The outback is the heart of Australia. It’s a place where the days are hot and the nights are cold. It’s a place where you can legally drive 130km/h. It’s a place where people say “no worries” (a.k.a “no wucckas”) a great deal, but it’s also a place which can be filled with lots of worries (in our modified Austra-Canadian version, “yes wucckas”).

The outback is a place where horror stories of broken down cars in the middle of nowhere are born. We’ve seen those broken down cars while driving Stuart Highway, and they’re no fairy tales. There are wrecks travelers must have given up on, set on neutral, and pushed into the desert – as it must have been cheaper that way than to tow hundreds of kilometers to fix. Well, having said that, while in Melbourne although we did everything we could to increase the reliability of our station wagon, it happened to us too – we broke down in the outback. At around 11am on the Lasseter Highway, on route to the sacred heart of Australia, Uluru, we started losing power. Acceleration did nothing. Ewa began asking why I was breaking. I wasn’t. I did not say a word until I safely used the remaining momentum to pull to the side of the road. Anger. Worries. Helplessness. Yes Wucckas. Five minutes later we flagged down a Belgium couple which offered to give us a ride 300km eastwards to the nearest bigger town of Alice Springs. I almost took the opportunity, but the thought of leaving Ewa behind in the car was too scary to bear. We waited another 5 or 10 minutes and flagged down an older Aussie couple in a 4WD truck going westwards on route to Uluru. Bob offered to tow us to the nearest roadhouse station where we could find a phone, and so we took the opportunity. 60km west we got there and started making calls only to find out that the nearest mechanic is another 100km west and the tow job would be over 400$. Bob helped jumped in to help out and resumed towing us instead. We got the car to the mechanic, took some food and camping gear from the car and got a drive to the nearby Ayers Rock Resort in Yulara (20km away from Uluru). Lucky? Unlucky? We got to Uluru – outback style!!! Thank You Bob!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 1:02 am and is filed under Hard Times, Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.