Bang!, Bang!
The road is straight for as far as eyes can see in the fading light, immediately in front of us is a concrete structure, like a low bridge causeway, guarded by a depth measuring pole rising two meters either side of the entrance, disappearing in my rear view mirror heading the opposite direction is a double trailer road train.
Following the bang the car drops on the passenger’s side and then bounces up again, only to have another smaller crash into the hole at the rear before settling into a regular flop, flop, flop sound of square wheels as we passed over the bridge thing and drifted to the shoulder of the road.
I don’t specifically remember if we spoke, but I am sure it was something like “FUCK” as I gripped the Astra Twin Tops steering wheel desperately guiding it on a straight line to avoid falling off the cause way into the marsh like plain on the passenger’s side, or drifting into the path of another road train.
I knew what happened, seconds before I saw the pot hole, I could have steered passed it if the road train wasn’t coming the other direction. Have you ever noticed when you have to pass something like a cyclist or a pedestrian, there is always on coming traffic narrowing your path.
The road train is a huge vehicle, with three or four trailers hanging off the back of the prime mover. They ply the outback roads of Australia in their thousands, they’re part of the fabric of life out there. When one comes passed you heading in the opposite direction it can physically move you from one side of the road to the other, especially when you are travelling in our little red car.
The choice is, “do I avoid the pothole and hope that the road train is not going to meet me at the exact moment I have moved to its lane, or do I take the pothole, you have a split second to decided”
I take the pothole please, FUCK it is the mother of all potholes, perhaps not as big as the car swallowing pot holes on the streets of Lae PNG but in terms of the Newall Highway, very deep and at speed limit of 110 kms, damaging.
Constantly rocking as the road trains, car and caravan rigs and other huge road vehicles continuously propel themselves passed us leaving a generous foot between 110 kilometer an hour hurtling steel and our parked car. Getting out of the car in between the big rigs is taking your life into your hands as is standing behind the car with the boot open. We are travelling so immediately the reader has to realise that the boot is actually full of our goods, all of which needs emptying on the side of the road. Once done, the next challenge is to find exactly how to shift the cover from over the spare wheel. Once done, there is an “Oh Fuck” moment again, as a fly crawls up my nose at exactly the same time it occurs to me that this is one of those stupid half wheels, that the Europeans have.
I have a flash back to a time passed where I was told that they are only half inflated and that we have to inflate as soon as possible. I suspect I didn’t deflate last time I used it? It also has a big warning on it telling us that 80 kms is the fastest speed we can travel on it.
Traveling long distances in very hot weather is perfectly fine until you get out of your air-conditioned tin can, then it hits you. It’s so hot it’s difficult to breathe and doing anything useful nearly impossible, to add to the misery in the Australian outback there is always a family of little flys crawling up your nose, in your ears, your eyes and around your mouth. This is why we have the Aussie wave as we are continuously brushing them away.
Now try to do something of a manual nature like rolling under the car to see where the jacking point it is. It’s okay when they made this car in Europe but this isn’t bloody Europe is it. The clothes I put on this morning were okay when we started driving but now I am laying in sticky tar topped with sharp little grey and black stones sticking in my skin with flys in every moist orifice trying to fit the inadequate jack to a non-existent jacking point. Do I sound frustrated , you bet I am bloody frustrated.
We only appeared to have a single flat tire, now filthy dirty with tar in places I didn’t want, the car being rocked and swayed by every trucker who tried to get as close to my vehicle as possible without actually hitting passed, I finally complete the tire change and repack the boot without actually going through a divorce ceremony with my long suffering wife.
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