Somewhere between the soul-crushing role of motorcycle sales and the wet season rain of a Darwin afternoon, I hit the button on the great escape, flight itinerary finally rendered in digital ink.
It’s a twenty-day fever dream split between the humid, Bintang-soaked island of Bali and the elegant, diesel-fumed grace of Vietnam. There’s a twenty-one-hour layover in Melbourne on the return leg, a strange, liminal haunting of a city that used to be home, just long enough to remember the coffee and forget the rent.
Then, the reckoning.
We’ll have a few desperate days in Darwin to strip the apartment, scrub the sins of our tenancy off the walls, and hand the keys back to a real estate agent who will undoubtedly find a microscopic flaw in the new kitchen. After that, we turn the van’s nose east. We’re heading for the deep, red heart of Outback Queensland.
The destination is the Betoota Outback Desert Muster. A loud, dusty country festival with some questionable talent. It’s about as far removed from the jungles of Asia as you can get.
- The Soundtrack: Country music and the low thrum of generators.
- The Fuel: Rum, red dust, and the ubiquitous, reliable comfort of a good pub feed.
- The Stakes: If we survive Betoota with our livers and our sanity intact, we push on to the Boulia Camel Races. It’s the same energy, only slightly more surreal, swapping horses for creatures with much worse tempers and even more impressive eyelashes.
The Hard Yakka
Red dirt and over-inflated fuel stops already mark the plans for June and July. Beyond that, it gets blurry.
If the bank account starts looking a little lean, we’ll pivot and hunt down some harvest work, a few months of “hard yakka” to remind the muscles what they’re for. There is a specific, honest dignity in physical labour that makes the subsequent beer taste like a religious experience.
Of course, there’s always the other path. If the budget allows, we might just retreat back to the tropics. In fact, it might be cheaper to spend the winter in Vietnam, trading the red dust of the Diamantina for the steam of a phở bowl in Hanoi.
That is the singular, terrifying beauty of the road: the freedom of choice. The ability to look at a map and realise that “home” is wherever you decide to park the van and kill the engine.
The flights are booked, and the countdown is on. Let’s see what happens.
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