Lonely Planets Unpacked

Working for Lonely Planet has prevented Dani from sailing across the Atlantic on a dog trampoline, mapping the human genome and hosting her own cooking show (Oh Naughty Wok). Other than that, she doesnt reckon its too bad. Dani supports native title for Australias Aborigines and the Carlton Football Club.

Y OU know how this ends. I got home alive. But when the car stopped rolling, heaved, and then sat, dreadfully silent and tangled way off the road, I hadnt known what was going to happen.

We were three days into an outback road trip. Id borrowed a friends dinky four-wheel drive, loaded it up with stuff, my housemate Dave, his Dutch girlfriend Lotte, and her friend Linda, and driven west, skirting Adelaide, to spend the night in rough-as-guts Port Augusta. Next day wed driven 500 kilometres or so north till we hit Coober Pedy. Its a gem and gimmick town, so hot that a lot of houses are hacked into the ground. We spent a day there, listlessly looking at opals and being hassled by bored locals, before pondering our map and choosing a dirt track arrowing east into the desert. It was 120 kilometres to the next settlement, an Aboriginal outstation where we could camp and fill up on bore water. We were assured that the people there could point out the road onward to the Oodnadatta Track, which we thought we might follow up north to the Simpson Desert.

We filled up with petrol and Kool Mints. I was driving, and I was happy. This was the real journey an empty rutted road, flat red desert left right in front and behind, and the wind pouring in the windows. Dave, in the front seat, talked expansively to the Dutch girls, explaining things I guessed hed read on cereal boxes. I joined in we were acting more Aussie than wed ever been, breathing Vegemite and bush lore. We told them how kangaroos were born, and stories of explorers (mixing, if I recall, the adventures of Burke and Wills with the trials of Amundsen on his way to the South Pole). They probably knew better, having already told us at dinner the night before about the federation of Australia, but they let us waffle on, our accents getting broader by the kilometre. I think I even said strewth and Im sure Dave said fair dinkum, things wed surely never heard anyone say in real life.

We were about an hour out of Coober Pedy, halfway to the outstation, taking a sandy hill at eighty kilometres an hour when it gave way to a bend, invisible till it was upon us. The car started skipping sideways, nothing to do with me. I felt I was righting it, working with the skid like a true-blue Aussie sheila, when the steering wheel dialled out of my hand, and in a blink, the car launched into a roll. A big skipping jaunty roll. A twisty airborne roll. A triple roll which went on for a long long time, and when it stopped we all breathed out and noticed that no-one had died.

Slowly we got out, very grateful, very scared. We picked ourselves out of the car limb by limb, counting to four and feeling lucky. We talked to one another gathering brief facts, getting assurances that we were all indeed OK. Dave was the only one with blood on him; a cut leg, not too bad. The roof rack was fifty metres along the road, debris and our gear strewn along the ground in between. We sat on the ground, flattened by shock and the gravity of our situation. We were about sixty kilometres from help in either direction. We hadnt seen one other car on the road. Wed passed no water, no crossroad, no building and certainly no emergency phone. I felt badly guilty but was too scared to ask if the others all blamed me.

Lotte and Linda were all for taking a bottle of water and walking back to town, but Dave and I talked them out of it, juicing up news stories about people in exactly our position whod been found dead of thirst just out of sight of their cars. We said it was essential that we all keep together.

We became organised, in a mechanical kind of way. An inventory was taken: we had food for three big camp-site meals (steaks and potatoes and corn and pumpkin and puddings in cans). A bag of oranges, ten litres of water, some biscuits, a wad of pot, Kool Mints.

Water was the most serious problem. What we had might stretch for a couple of hot, thirsty days, but it seemed quite likely we could wait a week for a rescue car. So we started pissing in bottles, building up an emergency reservoir. Dave and Lotte wanted to combine our piss; Linda and I were all for four separate stashes. But our cup never threatened to runneth over Dave was the only one who was able to catch much of his flow in the narrow-necked litre bottle wed recently emptied of lemonade.

I dug a hole in the lee of the car, scooping out hot sand and then cooler sand, almost wet. Could we wring out the sand somehow? Suck on it? I foresaw a dramatic death: having lost my mind, troubled and forsaken explorer-style, I sucked on sand and choked. I surveyed the shimmering red plain there wasnt even a tree on which I could carve my initials.

As I continued to dig, images from a school camp came to mind a bushcraft lesson in collecting water with a plastic bag, a leaf... wasnt there string involved somehow? Then I looked at my thighs big Aussie hams compared to the Dutch girls pegs and recalled a story about Antarctic explorers whod eaten their dogs, saving the heads till last. Most nutritious, those vitamin-rich doggy brains. I should be eaten first the guilty driver, the fleshiest.

The Dutch girls were looking at me, not looking hungry at all.

Of course, I said, we can collect water using leaves and string before we have to drink Daves piss.

Lotte and Linda looked fairly impressed.

We put our food and drink into the hole and set about collecting some wood. There wasnt much of it just scratchy saltbush twigs and stray windborne grass but we put it all in a pile which immediately blew away. We raced after it and chucked it into the car.