Around Oz in 80 Days - Hind Musafir Travels

So, you know, when I was a kid in Bombay, I used to walk down Colaba Causeway and look at these bookshops selling 4-wheel drive magazines. I said, one day I'm going to do this.

Sunit always had this dream of going around Australia in a 4x4, and he was always saying that if he was ever to— whenever there was the time when we had to leave Australia, we would see Australia before we do it.

What happened was we were in a corporate planning session and there were 3 of us. And we knew that one of us would probably not be around for very long. So just to get things going as we were doing our planning, we said, what is it that you want to do? What is it that you want to do in life? And I said, I'd like to go around Australia in a 4-wheel drive.

My reaction when I first found out we were going around Australia was that this could only be a joke. Because I didn't actually believe that we would go all the way around Australia, because, I mean, Australia is a really big place.

You know, I'm quite anal about planning, and in the end I couldn't resist, and I put a project plan together, a form of a mind map, and I was just counting the number of tasks to be done on it. And remember, we were just not going around Australia, we were packing up, we were leaving our home in Sydney, we were moving countries, There was this thing that we had to go to India as well. So yeah, it was a huge task.

Sunit was probably the main preparer in terms of getting the vehicle ready. We'd already done a few short trips or day trips with Vic Widman, so it wasn't as if it was something that was completely new. I sort of felt that we were always kind of preparing in small ways of doing this big trip around Australia. So when the opportunity came to do it, it wasn't like, oh, Oh my God, you know, it's a real shock. What are we going to do? We're not prepared for it.

Okay, boys.

Oh my God!

We needed six new tires, not four plus one, four plus two to be sure. To be sure, we had a UHF radio, a roof rack. We had a cargo barrier, the suspension which we upgraded to Bilstein Howell. A spare shock absorber, an Engel refrigerator, and we had the shelving at the back, which was just fantastic. And we had to remove all the seats from the back except one for Arjun, so it was pretty well set up.

Ah, the truck. Well, she was sometimes called Black Magic, and she was probably the only black vehicle in the fleet on the 2 tag-along tours that we were traveling on, and probably the only one with things like leather seats and walnut trim and that sort of stuff. So she's a very special, very special truck.

You know, Arjun's teachers, they were just fantastic. I mean, everyone in school was so supportive. They basically said, no matter who we spoke to, without FailSet, he'll probably learn more outside school than at school. So go for it.

My teachers said that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They were really supportive of it. And when I came back, I actually found out that my class did a unit about my trip.

We asked them for homework, and they said he should keep a journal. And, you know, on our trip, As we drove around Australia, we came around— we came across any number of families who had kids out of school, and he was out of school just for 80, 90 days, but these kids were out of school for a year or 2 years, and they were doing distance learning, and Australia really has a very good distance learning program. Despite the fact that this looks like a really tough, challenging, and gruelling across Australia thing, really speaking, For a lot of it, it was a tag-along tour, so we had a guide in the front who had a GPS, who had done this a number of times, who was a bush mechanic, and we were in a convoy of about 8 other trucks, so we were in very, very good hands.

Travelling in a tag-along was quite an interesting way of seeing Australia. The first part of our trip was going across the Simpson Desert, and there was no way that one would want to do that on their own. There's just too many risks involved. Also, being part of a tag-along, it was good to see how other people travel. because we were novices of actually doing something like this.

Okay, so just talking about our journey and the phases, it was broken into 3 legs essentially. From Sydney all the way to Alice Springs, that was the first leg. The second leg was from Alice Springs all the way to Broome. I guess the third leg was, and again I'll break it into 2, from Broome down to around Perth and the like. And the last leg was across the Nullarbor back home.

First leg of our journey, we're saying goodbye to Sydney, heading— taking a lot longer than we thought to do the final packing. We had completed 95% of the packing a few days before, and then the last 5-10% had to be done on the day.

It took us, what, you know, 3 hours just to pack the truck up. I'm sure it weighed more than 1,000 kilos. 2.5 tonnes, and we did not make the time that we thought we would make because we'd never travelled with so much load on us. So we were booked to stay at Ninghan at a campsite. We got there so late that we said we were going to shift into a cabin. Second day, we drove from Ninghan to Broken Hill, and that's where we caught up with the rest of the party. That was the first night we actually set up tent. It was absolutely magic. We had to eat all our fruit before entering Broken Hill. Because there was quarantine and we were quite stuffed because they told us you need to bring so much food and we had to eat a substantial portion of our food before we got into the start of our trip. And then from Broken Hill, we headed straight up north along the Silver Highway up to Innamincka and civilization just fell away. And that's where they filmed the movie Mad Max and it was Mad Max country. Not a tree, no nothing. It was completely desolate. It was spectacular. And then we headed to Birdsville, and Birdsville was where we actually started our trek across the desert.

The desert itself, it was just amazing. I didn't expect to see so many sand dunes and to know that they shift. So the sand dune that you may cross one month would be completely different to the sand dune the following month. And there's some really good shots of Arjun trying to slide down on a cardboard down the bottom of the Big Red and staggering back up again to do it all over again.

Because it's basically just a really massive roller coaster where you can joyride. Because in the end, we did about 1,417 sand dunes, just going up and down, up and down.

There was no radio reception. There was no television, there was no electricity, there was no one else. We realized how big the world was. You know, you could look around and see the horizon 360 degrees, right? And, and the sky at night was absolutely phenomenal.

And when you looked into that sky, it was jeweled with stars. The Milky Way was so visible. I've never ever seen it like that.

And one day Arjun came running inside, Papa, Papa, you've got to see the moon, it's amazing! It was at 3 o'clock in the bloody morning. So sleeping inside tents, that was definitely one of the highlights. So we had a Southern Cross Centre Pole tent. The tent goes up in about 30 seconds or so, and Arjun was our chief tent pegger. He became really, really good at pegging and putting up tents.

We had our own sleeping bags, but we also had some really good We had woolen army blankets, so in the middle of the desert we kind of slept in such a way that we could all share the blankets.

The temperatures used to dip down to -3 at night, but we've never been warmer in our lives.

The main incident that happened on that trip was probably me falling sick. I came down with sort of a really bad hay fever attack.

The dust is really, really fine, so obviously that got to her sinuses. So she was out for pretty much the entire time we were in the desert.

In terms of incidents, you know what, I was really, really, really, really bad. I was told by our guide, you know, that my air pressure tire, my tire pressure should be X, and I'd overinflated simply because I was greedy and I wanted better mileage. And guess what? I went over a rock and I had a tire burst.

Black Magic kind of did a bit of, sort of a bit of ass-to-face It kind of did a little bit of a 90-degree spin and we didn't quite know what was happening, but Sunit gallantly got the truck going in the right direction and everyone came to the rescue, changed the tyres, and we're back on the road again.

We're very, very lucky that we had a really good bunch of people, and between us we had a resident, I guess, geologist— that was me. We had someone who was really interested in birds. We had someone who was really interested in the In the plant life and and alike, and between us it worked out really really well. We're quite sure that we're the first Indian of the first Indian family to do to cross the Australian continent by road, and that that's pretty cool. So talking about the second leg of the journey, this was a leisurely. a 30-day trip compared to just the 15 days that we had for our first one. The second part was from Alice Springs and it finished off in Broome, and it was completely different in the sense that there was very little of desert as such. On the first couple of days, we had to make a lot of distance, and that was from Alice Springs on the Tanami Track all the way to Halls Creek. It's flat, it was gravel, it was a great drive, not very challenging. I really thought I was in Africa, you know, I was half expecting to see giraffes and zebras It was like the savannas. Once we hit Halls Creek and started going towards Kununurra, we were on the Gibb River Road, and this was alligator country, a lot of gorges, enough water, green forests. The artwork that we saw in some of the places that we stayed, we got to know something called Bradshaw art, we got to see Wintjana art, and this thing The book I read by Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods, just started coming back to me because what I could see was this is not just so many years old, this is more than, you know, 250,000 years old. I mean, it was older than anything that I'd seen in India. It was, it was quite spooky.

On our trip, we had many actual river crossings. But we also did a crossing along a causeway. I think it was called Ivanhoe, the Ivanhoe Causeway. And it was very dramatic because you actually had kind of like a concrete— it was like a dam, I'd say, over which one could actually drive. And it was a little bit hairy, but we saw lots of people doing it, so we thought, well, if they can do it, we can do it.

Whoa-ho-ho-ho! We hit the coast, we hit the Timor Sea. The Timor Sea, and after that we hit the Indian Ocean. Cape Lavik for all of us was the best place. It was on the Indian Ocean, a great camping spot looking down over the the Indian Ocean. It was very very magical. It was different from everything else that we'd done, and for me it was a great buzz. I was on the Indian Ocean. You know, I was pretending that if I looked. Far enough, I might be able to see India. It was not the Pacific, it was not the Atlantic, it was the Indian Ocean. How cool is that? In the second leg of the journey, we saw a lot of crocodiles. We got to understand the difference between a saltwater croc and a freshwater croc.

The only way you can tell the difference between a saltwater crocodile and a freshwater crocodile The difference between the 2 crocodiles is really that one lives in saltwater and one lives in freshwater. Otherwise, they look pretty much the same, except the saltwater crocodiles are slightly bigger because they're a lot more aggressive. But other than that, you basically have to hope you're in a freshwater stream. It's kind of funny because a week before Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray, my dad jumped into the water and right below was a stingray. Stingray twice the size of him, and the guide said, oh nah, they're just, they're harmless, they won't hurt you. And then a week later Steve Irwin winds up dead, so my dad was feeling quite creeped out by that.

At Broome we left the second tag-along tour group and then we travelled on our own. Making our way down the west coast of Australia, then across back to Sydney again.

It was quite scary. It was really, really scary because suddenly we are without any safety in the sense if we break down, we don't have anyone in front of us to help us. We run out of petrol, we are stuffed. The radio is silent, you know. We don't have the convoy to talk to. We don't know necessarily where they're going to be staying, and now we need to care where they're going to be staying and what it's going to be looking like and how far it is. In a Tagalong, peace of mind. The guy knows where he's taking us, he knows where to stop, he knows how far to drive, he knows how much fuel we need. This was, this was a whole new ballgame altogether. So yep, we started off in Broome, we made our way down to Port Hedland, and then down south we let go a gravel road to Marble Bar, which we should have gone, the hottest point in Australia, but instead we went to Karijini National Park, and I tell you what, that was bloody fantastic.

Kurangini National Park was the cherry on top of the cake. It was the most fantastic place for one to explore the rock formations, the water, little lakes and the rivers. It was just absolutely mind-blowing.

We went to X-Mouth where there were those big listening station, listening to all of the, you know, radio conversations in the world. And then we hit the coast and started coming down south— Jurien Bay, Carnarvon. And by the way, all through our journey, the one thing that was keeping us going was where do we find mangoes? And we found mangoes in all of the northern parts, and we really enjoyed having mangoes.

Once we left Perth and made our way down south, we went through the Margaret River wine country and We also went right down south to Albany, which was the last place where they did the whale hunting, and that was quite significant in the sense that they had this amazing whale museum and you could actually smell the whale sperm whale oil.

The highlight for me was visiting Margaret River, great wine-growing country. Visited most of the vineyards, made copious notes, did copious tastings, but this was all in the line of duty. This was not pleasure. And then we went down to where, you know, the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean and then started heading across Australia. Albany, Norsewood, and then across the Nullarbor Plain.

And we stayed in some amazing hotels there. One that comes to mind is the Wedgetail Eagle. We slept in shipping containers and it was so basic, but it was a roof over our heads because there was no way you could pitch a tent in those southerly winds. It was just impossible.

What we learnt about ourselves and what we learnt about us as a family is that we need very, very, very little.

The main thing I learnt from going around Australia was how much we depend on, because you take a lot of things for granted until they're taken away from you.

You don't really need much. For us, our home was our truck and what was behind it and what was in it. And that's— it was the people that I was traveling with that were— that was all I really needed.

You know, coming back, there are two aspects to it. One was when we came out of almost nowhere back into civilization. Suddenly we started having electricity again. There were lights. We had rooms. This was completely redundant. We didn't need this. We were happier when none of this existed. We didn't need it.

And to come back to civilization meant making choices and kind of having to come back to the— to real life and life becoming a bit more complicated rather than the simplicity of living in the outback with with very few choices and, you know, living minimalistically.

Coming back to Sydney was interesting. Arjun had carried the water from the Indian Ocean, and what we were going to be doing was melding the 2 waters together. And so he ceremoniously poured the water Off Spit Bridge into the Pacific. And in a way, it was us coming back home again.