The Long Hitch Home Read online

  I found myself a suitable spot at Nurrungar and waited. And then waited some more. Today’s vehicle count was low, temperature high, and the number of sand flies astronomical. The rapacious little buggers were all over me, swarming about my face, trying to get at my eyes and mouth. Unzipping the hidden mosquito netting of my sun hat, I pulled it down over my head. It worked a treat, providing an effective, if slightly odd, respite from their advances. Although they were prevented from getting through the netting, the flies were still crawling all over it and buzzing away, just centimeters from my face, at an instinctively uncomfortable proximity.

  Nurrungar was an odd area to wait in. Somewhere out there in the desert, hidden from view from the roadside, was a one-time highly restricted military facility, run jointly during the cold war by the U.S. Air Force and Australian Department of Defence; an installation that leaked Australian Department of Defence documents reveal controlled satellites used to pin point targets for the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, a secret and illegal act which killed half a million people.14

  After about forty minutes of waiting, a red van approached on the horizon. When it was close enough for its driver to actually see me, I pulled off my fly net. As the van gradually got nearer I could see a lone woman behind the wheel. Despite the lift from Margaret, I didn’t hold out much hope of her stopping, especially since the next proper town, Coober Pedy, was 230 miles away, meaning she’d have to be willing to take me at least this far by herself. But to my delight, as she got closer, the van began to slow down, coming to a stop beside me.

  “Come on, get in!” said an enthusiastic bob-haired girl in her early twenties, wearing a black tank top.

  I thanked her and pulled open the sliding rear door, revealing a mattress and assorted camping supplies inside. I threw my backpack in and took a seat up front.

  “I’m Mandy,” said my new driving companion, reaching over to shake my hand, exposing a tattoo of a lizard on her wrist.

  With introductions aside, I asked where she was heading.

  “Broome,” she replied. “Long drive, hey?”

  At over 2,360 miles, it certainly was.

  “What about you?”

  “Darwin, but I’m going to stop off at Uluru first.”

  “It’s your lucky day, me too.”

  This was sweet, joyous music to my ears. Not only had I managed to score a lift out of the dreaded Nurrungar in double-quick time, but it was going direct to the elusive Uluru that had thwarted me for so long, and, what’s more, was heading north afterwards. I’d avoid having to hitch out of Alice Springs, and would practically make it to my final destination in Australia too, since, to get to Broome, Mandy would have to go within 200 miles of Darwin. In all, the ride would equate to roughly 1,720 miles through a hot and treacherous landscape that had got the better of me once before. But not this time. All I had to do was sit back and enjoy the ride.

  Mandy was talkative, and told me much of her life in Adelaide where she was a horticulture student. She was currently on her holidays and heading to Broome to work at an oyster farm where you could get well-paid cash-in-hand work. She was partly heading there for the money, partly for the adventure, but mostly to get away from her boyfriend who, in her words, was “such a dick.” When I asked why she was going out with him then, she replied, with a confused shake of the head, “I don’t know.”

  The drive was an unsurprisingly desolate one along a sparsely used road, which had many dead kangaroos on its side, and even the occasional bloated corpse of a cow—most likely coming from Anna Creek, the world’s largest cattle ranch located hereabouts, which at six million acres (the size of Belgium) is eight times as big as the world’s second largest ranch, King’s Ranch in Texas. Ranches in this part of the world are so ridiculously oversized to cope with the impotency of the land, which has to make do with an average rainfall of just eight inches a year—and sometimes no rain at all. For the ranchers of Anna Creek this works out at about three good years in every ten.

  “If we find some fresh road kill we should cook it tonight,” said Mandy as we passed another decomposing carcass. “My family’s a bit feral like that.”

  Road kill was fine by me. I’d picked up a whole roe deer in the U.K. once, and even a hare; both were delicious. Mandy took things way beyond my concept of “food for free” however.

  “When my mum and I were in Darwin we came across a house with some pet ducks in the garden, so we snuck in there and took one.”

  “You stole someone’s pet?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “Yeah, was bloody tasty too!”

  I didn’t know quite what to make of that.

  Three and a half hours of driving and we arrived at the next settlement, Coober Pedy, an outback town of roughly 2,000 people, billed as the opal mining capital of the world. Coober Pedy’s surrounding terrain made for an interesting break from the flat monotony, consisting of thousands of distinctive pyramidal mounds scattered across the landscape—leftover debris from opal mining. This had occurred in the area since 1915, when a group of prospectors out hunting for gold stumbled instead upon copious quantities of opals. For the miners who set up in Coober Pedy, life was, and still is, hard. Temperatures can push 120 degrees Fahrenheit and the area suffers from an extreme lack of water. Nearby is the world’s largest salt pan, Lake Eyre, covering 3,500 square miles, into which drains a fifth of Australia’s water, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find much of the stuff there; it has only filled up four times since records began in 1885. Such an extreme scarcity of water saw the early residents limited to a meager two gallons a week. The town is so hot that miners who live year round in Coober Pedy do so in homes underground known as “dugouts,” where the temperature is much cooler. This practice is reflected in Coober Pedy’s name, which in the local Aboriginal language means “white man’s burrow.” There was even an underground Catholic church.

  Back in the van we continued north until just before nightfall, when we pulled off the side of the road, set up camp and got a fire going. In a frying pan we cooked up sausages, eggs, and beans; a hearty fare which we settled down to with a strong cup of tea. When the crepuscular light finally slipped away and night descended on a clear desert sky, we were treated to a wondrous display of stars, millions of little diamonds scattered across a timeless, inky-black sky. Our campfire’s faint light stretched out to the nearby bushes, illuminating them with an orange haloey glow. Beyond, everything was darkness.

  Perhaps it was the soothing primeval crackle of the fire’s dancing flames, or perhaps Mandy just needed someone to talk to, but soon she began to divulge her motivations for making the trip. She delved into the detail of what sounded like a highly dysfunctional relationship of several years, which, for whatever reason, she couldn’t quite bring herself to terminate.

  “There’s no love in it. It’s only sex now and the sort of sex we have doesn’t involve love.”

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have pried, but I guess I was curious as to what she meant. Mandy explained how she and her boyfriend took part in what I suppose you’d describe as extreme bondage or kinky sex, including ropes, restraints, and other paraphernalia.

  Interesting.

  “It was fun and exciting at first, but it’s not love, is it?” she said, suddenly seeming really down, almost to the point of tears.

  “Do you love him?” I asked.

  “I don’t even like him!” she replied. “He went to Thailand with his mates to fuck prostitutes, and didn’t even pretend that he didn’t when he got back.”

  I tried to counsel her as best I could, telling her that if she was unhappy in the “relationship” —a term I used very lightly—then she should end it.

  “Yeah, I should,” she replied sheepishly, which seemed to imply she realized such logic well enough, but still had no intention of actually following through with it.

  I awoke shortly after dawn to a chorus of galahs heralding the beginnings of a fresh day. Unzipping the mosquito dome of my inner tent, I emerged to a
crisp, crystal-clear morning with a huge blue sky, and immediately set about getting the fire going again.

  As ember was nurtured into the flickering new life of a flame, I looked out across the desert’s bright-red sands and ruminated on how alive I felt at this moment—largely because I was living within it, centered in the nexus of the here and now, not worrying for tomorrow, for I had no idea what tomorrow or today would bring. It was just the way I liked it. There is something about the open road, and the allure of the possibilities that come with it, that I find deeply satisfying. I can rationalize some of my motivations for traveling, for dropping everything safe and commonplace, and running off into the unknown, but there is a larger part of me that can’t quite articulate the power of this elusive internal calling. It is an innate primal drive that I simply obey. For to deny it is to deny myself. I have read of geneticists who have identified what is colloquially known as the explorer or adventure gene, a mutation of gene DRD4, known as DRD4-7R, or 7R for short. Research has shown that 7R is tied to restlessness, curiosity, novelty seeking, and risk taking, making those who harbor the gene more likely to embrace exploration, movement and new ideas. I wondered if I possessed it. It is found more frequently in migratory cultures than in sedentary ones, and in one study among Kenya’s cattle herding tribesman, the Ariaal, it was observed that those carrying 7R were healthier—in terms of being stronger and better fed—than those who didn’t. However, among the Ariaal’s settler cousins, those who carried 7R tended to be less well-nourished and successful. It seemed to ring true with my own life: flourishing on the move; stagnating when stationary.

  When the fire was good and hot, Mandy joined me from the van, bringing with her the ingredients to make a classic Aussie bush food: damper bread.

  To make a damper, or unleavened, bread, in its most elemental form, you simply mix flour and water into a dough, then cook it in the embers of a fire. Done this way there’s no need for a pot or other utensils and, best of all, there’s no washing-up afterwards. Dampers were first made by the Aboriginals using wild acacia seeds which they ground into a flour between rocks then added water to make a dough. They would then bury this in embers to cook. When the early explorers saw this they borrowed the concept, substituting their own flour for the acacia flour and adding other ingredients when they were available. Mandy chucked in some rosemary and onion in hers, while I threw in some salt and milk powder in mine. Other handy ingredients are baking soda and, best of all, warm beer—the heated yeast from which helps the bread rise.

  We cooked them for about half an hour, then excavated the dampers with a long gnarled stick. They weren’t much to look at as they emerged from the coals, having an overall coating of ash and a charred black outer crust, but as we cut into them a soft, moist, fluffy center was revealed, which was surprisingly tasty, especially when served with melted butter.

  Breakfast completed, we struck camp and got back on the road, driving until mid-afternoon when we reached the Erldunda turning for Uluru, which now lay only 157 miles away to the west. I’d been past this spot on my previous lift out of Nurrungar, but back then had made the mistake of continuing north 123 miles to Alice Springs with the intention of finding employment. As we turned west now at Erldunda a triumphant smile crept across my face. Every mile from here on in was closer to a place I had hungered to visit for far too long.

  We continued until we reached a roadhouse, outside which was a giant outback “road train.” Road trains are long trucks, in which the tractor unit pulls not one, but four trailers, making for some tricky overtaking for other road users. We pulled in beyond the road train and stopped for gas. I filled her up while Mandy went inside the shop to pay, emerging with a slab of beers, which she immediately indulged in. There was about sixty miles to go so I offered to drive. She accepted.

  “You want one?” offered Mandy, as she clambered into the back, reclining on the mattress with her stash.

  I was tempted but declined. It wasn’t just that I didn’t fancy the prospect of a bit of literal drunk driving, but having only had a damper to eat today, I knew it would go straight to my head. To have finally made it out here almost bordered on a spiritual journey for me, and so as much as a beer would have gone down a treat, I wanted my first impression of Uluru to be a sober one. Eventually I caught sight of it. Jutting abruptly from the flat horizon to a height of over 1100 feet, emerged the unmistakable loaf-shape monolith of Uluru, standing proud and alone like an immortal orange beacon amid a hauntingly empty expanse of desert wilderness. My heart skipped. It was like a giant magnet and I a piece of iron drawn towards it. I was mesmerized by its size, beauty, and awe, and drove staring more at Uluru than the road, a feeling that intensified the closer I got. Currently a soft orange hue, the scattered clouds above cast this strange isolated mountain with its ruffled near-vertical walls into shifting dappled patterns of light and dark, highlighting random undulating grooves and the overall ripples of its surface.

  By the time we arrived at the entrance to the Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park I was on a high. Purchasing a ticket for twenty-five dollars, I drove down to one of the main scenic lookouts, the Uluru Sunset Viewing Area, where several tourists had parked to take photos and soak in the grandeur of the view. I got out to do likewise. Mandy remained prostrate in the back drinking, but pulled open the van’s sliding door so she could see Uluru at the same time. I left her to it and wandered off for a better look.

  Uluru is no easy place to describe. Sure, you can talk about its physical shape, the history of the site, or go into details about its geology—and rest assured, dear reader, I will—but there is so much more to Uluru, something indefinable that is difficult to convey, especially if you want to avoid sounding like a New Age hippie. But sound like one I must, for an intangible quality exists there, a deep and powerful atmosphere that seeps into you. Gazing out at this sacred rock I could almost feel it calling to me, bypassing logic and connecting with my heart. It was hypnotic, transfixing me. If I broke my gaze to look elsewhere, the rock would pull me back again. The longer I stared at Uluru the more connected I felt to it and the wider landscape, an expansive feeling where I could almost sense the ageless rhythm of this giant desert heart beating too within my own.

  I stood for the best part of forty minutes just watching, soaking in the atmosphere. I tried to imagine the majesty the first explorers must have felt on stumbling upon it, and could so easily understand why it was a sacred site to the Aboriginals. It was to me, too. And I think it would be for just about anyone with their blood still pumping. There is an old surfing saying: “If surfing doesn’t make you feel alive then you are probably already dead.” For me, the same could be said of Uluru. I headed back to the van, jumping in up front.

  “Why don’t we drive right up close to Uluru?” I suggested, turning around to face Mandy who was still reclining on the mattress.

  “Why don’t you come and join me in the back?” she replied.

  Uh-oh. This could prove awkward.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I responded.

  “Come on, don’t be the fun police, Jamie,” she said, slightly biting her bottom lip afterwards and fixing me with a suggestive lingering stare.

  I tried changing the subject. “So what do you say, shall we drive up to Uluru?”

  “We’ve got all day tomorrow for that. Come on, get into the back with me and let’s have some fun. I’m so horny right now!”

  “Mandy, I’ve got a girlfriend,” I said, taken aback by her forwardness.

  “You don’t know what she’s up to while you’re away. Come on, why don’t we get wild?”

  “Mandy, please don’t do this.”

  “Do you ever get wild, Jamie? Think of all the things we could do.”

  She reached up and undid a small bulldog clip used to fasten a curtain across the rear window. “I wonder what we could do with this,” she said, looking at it with fake curiosity.

  Why hadn’t more things like this happened to me wh
en I was single?

  After all, Mandy was kind of attractive in a sort of “out there” crazy kind of way, but I had zero intention of ever cheating on Emily. And not just because of the betrayal it would have been of her; I could well do without the guilt as well. If I had been single then it would have been a different story. But I wasn’t single and Mandy knew it, which riled me. As did the location she had chosen for her advances, which was now tainting my experience of Uluru. A minute earlier I was soaking in the sublime beauty of somewhere I considered a sacred site. But instead of savoring Uluru’s serenity and atmosphere, I was now fending off the sexual advances of a kinky girl, carrying more than a little emotional baggage to boot.