Tambo

We decided to do daily updates for our outback roadie, we don’t want it all to turn into a big blur! If you don’t want to read them all, the summary is: we relocated a motorhome from Darwin to Brisbane. If you do, here goes.

Day 1: Br1dget

Excitement plus as we return our rental car and Uber across to pick up our motorhome. She's a big beast! It seems astonishing that all you need is a full licence to drive one of these things. We sign a bunch of disclaimers, get shown around our vehicle and that’s it. I’m too damn excited to pay attention so I hope M4rk was listening. Back to the motel to pick up our luggage with only one minor incident on the way - the indicators are on the left but the right isn't the windscreen wipers, it's the gears! I put her into reverse going out of the rental company driveway. Whoops. I also resolve to hit kerb crossings square-on from that early experience because she sure does bump about. Back to the motel to collect our stored luggage and groceries, and immediately it gets super hot in the back of the motorhome while I’m finding places for our things. Should we be concerned about driving in this heat?

I drive her more gently out of the motel driveway than any mother taking her newborn for its first pram outing. In Darwin city I drive around 30km/h and gradually get up the nerve to increase this to around 70km/h on the open road - I’m too nervous to drive any faster because the whole thing rattles and screeches at speed like an A320. It takes me a while to work up to 80 km/h, then 85km/h. No worries that I'm ever going to get a speeding ticket in this thing.

The kids are seated in the dinette seating in the rear. It seats four (two on each side of the table) so they have their pick of seatbelts and front / rear facing. They are quite comfortable rear-facing and don't seem to suffer from looking at their iPads for long periods of time (shout-out to M4rk’s wifi). They are in their Bubblebum car seats, little inflatable booster seats that we've been carrying around since June but have never used. It will sound odd to any NZ readers (and I never would have believed it if you'd told me a year ago) that we appear to have been so cavalier with the children's vehicle safety in Asia, but we have literally not seen any car seats on our travels. Traffic is slow, and children travel unbuckled on their parents' laps in the front seat. Ours always wear seatbelts and always sit in the back seat, but even that feels like overkill in most places we've been. We had been eyeing up the Bubblebum seats as a potential item to ditch - they're not heavy or bulky but if we haven't used it, why are we still lugging it around? - but are now pleased we didn't. The children are comfortable on them, the only downside is they don't have side head support so the kids can't nod off for a nap. Actually I'm not sure that is a downside after all.

Because they're seated on dinettes rather than actual seats, they take a while to get used to the idea that the motorhome is a car-like vehicle rather than a form of public transport. At one point as M4rk is driving he looks in the rear view to see M0ses looming over his shoulder, he'd unclipped his belt and walked forward to the cabin to have a chat about something or other. He is frightened enough by our response that he doesn’t do it again. He reasons that it feels like being in a bus or a plane, not a car.

South of Darwin the road is in good condition despite the amount of traffic. For a long time it's a divided highway with two lanes in each direction, sometimes with an old WWII airstrip alongside. We stop in Humpty Doo for lunch, a small town about half an hour south of Darwin that is straight from the Runt / The Castle playbook of classic Australian place names. M0ses reckons they must have been running out of place names by the time they got this far north. The Humpty Doo tavern had the odd (in both senses of the word) local having a midday beer but was mostly empty. It is locally renowned for running saltie races on Melbourne Cup day instead of tuning into the Melbourne Cup. Seems cruel to me to tape the mouths of juvenile crocs and make them race each other, but then again I guess the same could be said for the Melbourne Cup.

After a few hours on the highway there is less traffic but proportionately more road trains. These are the massive, and I mean massive, trucks with multiple articulations. Road trains are allowed to be up to 53.5m long - all pulled by one cab - which is the equivalent of 12 cars. They drive at around 100km/h, clearly a lot faster than I am prepared to drive in our rattly beast. They are also extraordinarily heavy which means that they can take up to 200m to stop when driving at 100km/h (info courtesy of road signs outside Katherine). My Dad would have said all that freight should be on the rail, and he’s right. We don’t ever see a train on the railway.

The first time I have a road train bearing down on me from behind, I start by holding my speed but end up with a road train right up my jacksie and flashing lights at me. I'm not sure what he was expecting me to do, there's literally nowhere to pull over and that would have meant he would have needed to slow down too. Of course I have to speed up, and I pull over as soon as I can for him to pass. Since then I just slow right down on the long straights so they can overtake me, I have no desire to be bulldozed along a highway by a road train ever again.

Of course I end up in a road train sandwich, unavoidable at the time but it was just when we had to stop for a road closure due to an earlier crash. 45 minutes' wait in the stinking heat - we leave the engine running as does everyone else and let the kids take their seatbelts off and wander around the cabin. We later talk to a couple who had to wait for six hours - that would really run down your fuel reserve. We decide to fill up several times a day. The road train behind me clearly doesn’t think he is going to stop in time and pulls right over onto the shoulder to avoid hitting us from behind. As it turns out he has heaps of space but in this huge motorhome - the biggest vehicle either of us have ever driven - it's humbling to be one of the smallest vehicles on the road.

We pull into Katherine around 6pm, later than planned due to the road closure, just in time for a perfect sunset. By 7pm it is still 39 degrees so we are thankful for the powered site which means we can run the aircon overnight. I take the kids for a swim while M4rk cooks pasta for dinner, which we eat outside in wet togs. It takes a while to set up the beds but is an early night after all that concentrating and all that heat. M0ses and I think we’ll try sleeping in the over-cabin cubbyhole.

We have eight days to get to Brisbane and we’ve done less than a tenth of the distance: there’s a long way still to go from here.Read more