A Dingo Ate My Baby! (Part I)

...and other spring break adventures with Boo, Dhu, and Lefty the donkey!
During our one week off from school, Indhu and I embarked on an action-packed roadtrip to Flinders Ranges and Coober Pedy for hiking and camping and then to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road with our Aussie friend Brad. Seeing more of Australia was only half of the excitement. Driving, as it turned out, was the other half.

Indhu bravely took the first shift of driving our rental car out of the city as I didn't want to be one responsible for getting us killed before we had the opportunity to see anything cool. As we got into our compact Toyota Yaris in the Budget parking lot in the middle of a busy part of town, I said to Indhu, "Just act like you know what you're doing and no one at Budget will think it was a mistake to rent to us." She nodded, turned the car on, hit her right hand on the window when she instinctively went to change gears, and then turned on the windshield wipers instead of the turn signal as she pulled out into the busy intersection.

Shit, we both thought silently, we are going to die on this trip.

Once we got out of the city, however, we pretty much had the highway to ourselves. Still, it took me all of the four days on the road to learn to not turn on the wipers when signaling a turn. Nothing makes a driver look more like an asshole -- or an idiot -- than passing without a turn signal, with the wipers scraping furiously back and forth across a dry windshield when it's a perfectly clear day out.

We drove five hours and spent the night at a campsite in Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges National Park. We arrived at dusk, pitched our tent, and having nothing else to do for the rest of the evening, proceeded to gorge ourselves on the two cooler bags of food we brought. We removed every item from the bags -- ciabatta bread, brie, apple slices, strawberries, chocolate, and nuts -- placed them onto the wooden table and then feasted - for hours.

The next morning, we packed up our sleeping bags and tent and re-created the gourmet buffet from the previous night for breakfast, before setting out on a short hike into Wilpena Pound. To be honest, the scenery from within the Pound wasn't as amazing as I had hoped it would be, but I really needed the exercise. I hadn't had to exert this much physical effort since I carried my luggage up three flights of stairs into our apartment three months earlier.

The brochure we picked up from the visitor's center claimed a 3-hour return trip time but Indhu and I completed the entire hike in about half the time, which led me to believe that the estimation was based on the walking speed of a family of one-legged cripples. We had enough time for another hike but I was already sore and lacking motivation, so we got back into the car and set off for Quorn (pronounced "corn") where we had booked a reservation at a hostel.

We made it into town right before dusk, but despite Quorn being the largest and most populated town within a 200km radius of Flinders Ranges, there was nothing to do there except sit and pick at one's toes. None of the stores were open and we barely managed to buy some food from the grocery store before it closed. Luckily, Indhu and I weren't the only ones staying at the hostel. We befriended three girls from Adelaide who had skipped out on a couple of days of school to roadtrip up to Flinders for the weekend. The hostel owner made a bonfire out in the backyard for us and the five of us spent the evening sitting around the fire and chatting while one of the girls strummed her guitar.

The gals

The next day, Indhu and I drove nearly six hours from Quorn up north to Coober Pedy (an aboriginal name for "white man in a hole" -- how awesome is that), a small, bizarre, dodgy opal mining town in the middle of nowhere. We got there exhausted, and when we saw the town, all I could say was, "That's it? This is what we drove all this way for?" There was nothing around except for huge mounds of dug up dirt everywhere and wandering packs of dogs. You can easily drive through the entire town in less than a minute. The cool thing about Coober Pedy though is that because it gets so hot during the summer months, a lot of buildings are underground including houses, restaurants, churches, and shops. We spent about an hour and a half checking out different underground sights before we exhausted most of the free stuff.

Underground church

For Indhu, the novelty of underground buildings wore out pretty quickly. I think it might have dissipated even before we arrived. So we checked Coober Pedy off our to-do list, got back into the car, and drove back down south and made it to the town of Glendambo before it got dark. Apparently, "town" was just another word for "gas station." Adjacent to the BP, the rest of this town consisted of a caravan park and pub. Oh, and a windmill and public telephone.

Indhu and I paid $15 to stay at the caravan park only to end up sleeping in the car because the ground was too hard for the tent stakes and I was convinced that sleeping in the car would be more comfortable. (I was wrong.)

Again, we didn't have much with which to entertain ourselves after it got dark, so we turned the car into a photo studio and what came of it should not be made public.

The next morning we set out for our drive back to Adelaide. And here is where the real fun began.

Indhu: "Should we get gas before we leave?"
Me: "How much gas is in the tank?"
Indhu: "Right below the half way mark."
Me: "We can make it to the next gas station before we need to fill again."
Indhu: "Okay."

Indhu drove for about an hour when we came across the first gas station. We didn't stop and a short while later, Indhu suddenly says, "Shit. We have a quarter tank of gas left." I pulled out a map and checked where we were. My heart skipped a beat. There were no gas stations for another 170km until Port Augusta. When I broke the news to Indhu, she looked like she was going to throw up all over the dashboard.

Indhu: Fuck.
Me: Should we turn around and go back to Pimba?
Indhu: I don't know.

We kept driving. After a few minutes, I asked Indhu if she was okay. She removed her hand from her mouth and after a brief moment of silence croaked, "Oh god, I need to poop."

Me:(While suppressing a fit of laughter) There's no time for pooping right now.
Indhu: I get like this every time I'm nervous.
Me: Pull yourself together!
Indhu: Oh gawwwd.

(Indhu, if you ever read this, I'm sorry. It was too funny to not share.)

I rechecked the map and then we started to try to convert liters into gallons and kilometers into miles because neither of us could think in a different metric system and gauge whether we could make it to Port Augusta before the tank went empty.

Me: We have a 41-lite tank. So we have to go 170km on about 10 liters of gas.
Indhu: I know that there are 32 ounces in a liter!
Me: Hmm.... Okay. So how is that going to help us exactly?
Indhu: I don't know.
Me: Right.

We had already passed the point of no return, so we slowed down to a crawl to conserve gas and sat in nervous silence. I was still peppy enough to take some photos from the car. There wasn't much else we could do so I might as well have used the opportunity to get some good pictures of the Outback. Afterall, what was the worse that could happen right? (Er, Wolf Creek, anyone? I heard about this "true story" after we got back to Adelaide.)

After an hour, the empty light came on. Road signs indicated that we were still over half an hour away from our destination. My palms started to sweat and Indhu basically looked like she had stopped breathing. When we finally rolled into the first gas station in Port Augusta, we cheered. I got out to fill the tank and when the handle of the nozzle clicked off, the meter clocked in at 40.56 liters. With less than half a liter of gas left in the tank, we had just barely made it. Pretty exciting, no?

Fill 'er up!

Trip summary:
Kilometers traveled: 1085
Hours drove: 20+
Live lizards encountered on the road: 7
Lizards that did not survive the encounter: 3
Other roadkill seen: 12+
Nights spent not sleeping in a bed: 2
Hikes: 1
Candy bars eaten: too many

She Lives!

In case you were wondering, I am indeed alive. Due to a stressful week of finals and a trip out of town for my semester break, I have neglected to post any entries on this blog. I'm sure you have noticed. And yet you keep coming back. I appreciate your devotion to Boo's adventures in Oz.

I suspect that by now you are bored of watching OK Go music videos and revisiting old posts about ho fun and mouth magic -- although I can't imagine how anyone could have enough of that. That stuff can keep me entertained for days on end.

But I can only expect so much before you begin to contemplate the thought of removing my blog as a bookmark in your web browser. So how about I try to entice you with promises of titillating posts in the very near future. And plenty of captivating eye candy too. Sounds good, doesn't it. Oh it will be.

Stay tuned...