i'm sorry about this shamefully shit video (in which i've run out of WA map and have started using google earth - possibly an improvement), but we did virtually nothing on day 11 except for drive!
on that sunday in june, we awoke at a rest stop along the victoria highway surrounded by no less than 32 other 4WDs/caravans/campervans. g and i made a new discovery: white trash gets old, and then it travels.
what shocked me the most was not that these people had brought satellite dishes, portable toilets and fold-out kitchens, or that they refused to speak to anyone else, but that so many of them had brought their dogs. WTF? no national park in australia lets you bring your dog in, and yet the point of being up there was to get into those parks and see the glory that this country had to offer...otherwise all you got to see was bitumen! what exactly were they doing there?! WTF?
driving in jasper was wonderful; we had only two issues: the first was that the boot got clogged with red dust in the kimberley and only opened on a single subsequent occasion for the entire trip. it was during this single occasion that we thankfully had the foresight to rescue all of our water and cooking equipment from the back after having spent the previous night eating cold baked beans out of a can. i wasn't particularly bothered (it was like a nostalgic throwback to life before the g-man) but my hausfrau needs his cooked meals every day, so the rescue came just in the nick of time. incidentally, the baked beans night occurred in psycholand - only adding insult to injury - and later as we had all the doors and windows locked and closed on guard against psychos, tummies churning through all those beans, it added a certain injury to insult.
the other issue was that of a flashing 4WD display on jasper's dashboard. either the display didn't work properly, or else we couldn't actually get him out of 4WD for the entire journey. though it may not sound like too much of an issue, the road between purnululu and katherine was all bitumen, and being stuck in 4WD for 650km at 130kph is not a carbon neutral event. we are currently in negotiations with the indonesian government to have borneo reforested to offset our roadtrip.
the long drive gave me a chance to read while g was thumping away with his ipod (there was a frightening correlation between the type of music g was listening to and how fast he drove the car - ballads tended to find us driving just under the speed limit, dance music was fast but safe, and bad-ass frog-rap had us hurtling over corrugated dirt roads at 130kph with me clutching at the handrails screaming and begging for him to slow down). the two books that i was mainly reading were the god delusion by richard dawkins and the koran by god via the archangel gabriel to the prophet mohammed*
*debatable
the god delusion was a well written and fun case of preaching to the converted, until i stumbled upon a section in which dawkins uses his judeo-christian preconceptions to make hideously conservative and unscientific statements about the nature of sex, love and family that struck a discordant note with the rest of the book and somewhat put me off. the koran, just like the bible and the tanakh before it, was predictably full of nonsense. every page i was told that god was merciful, but then every second line i was reminded that i would burn in hell for the rest of eternity for what i felt were relatively minor offences, often completely beyond my control. i thought: that's not merciful. incidentally, the description of heaven in the koran - with its running streams and so forth - represented the exact same landscape that we were driving through on the roadtrip! so now even god agrees: it's paradise up there.
we turned up in katherine, rushed to woolworths for some much needed supplies, and then headed to katherine gorge for what we thought would be an evening of riverside camping. on arrival, we were told that the river was not croc-free due to the recent rains, so instead of paying for the unpleasure of a river you can see but not touch, we poked around on old dirt tracks outside the national park until we found a gorgeous sandy river to camp by. there was one other person there - a middle aged man with a sad face who seemed to be eating a lot of cucumbers and staring into the middle distance - but we only exchanged a few phrases and let him be. we weren't quite sure what his story was until well after sunset when another man in a van turned up, quietly parked his car and crept into the other guy's car for the night, leaving discretely just before sunrise. it all looked fairly brokeback to me.
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