“I’ve heard there’s a tap in Hopetoun. You can fill up there.” said Bead.
“Great” I commented, sipping the glass of south Aussie red he’d given me and relaxing a bit more into the camper seat I was parked on.
I’d lost my water, a pretty important thing to carry with you in this part of the world, off the back of the bike earlier that day. It had probably shaken loose by the rough, deeply corrugated dirt road that led to the campsite in which we were now sitting, deep in the wildness of Fitzgerald River National Park.
Bead and Lou were a newly retired couple in their early sixties travelling around Oz in their camper van and they’d invited me over for a glass of wine.
“How far off is that?” I asked.
“About 40km” Bead replied.
“Right.”
Australia. Yep, as expected - its BIG. REALLY big.
It’s only been 12 days since I landed in Perth. And the culture shock has been big, which is ironic given how familiar everything is.
The last ten months has been about a series of small, incremental changes as you pass through different countries. Since leaving the UK, little by little the comforts of home dropped away and the differences began to add up.
It was only 3 weeks ago, when suffering a particularly nasty bout of diarrhoea in an outside squat toilet (no loo paper, no soap, just a bucket of water) at an Indonesian truck stop that I was reflecting on how far I was from the relatively pampered existence of home.
Along with wild camping, cheap hotels where the only qualifying conditions are cost and whether there is somewhere safe to park the bike, sleeping rough in marriage halls, police stations and on the floor of a very sweaty ferry, this was the kind of adventure I’ve been looking for - and it’s exactly what I got.
Like most Brits my age, Oz is familiar for many reasons - despite the fact I’ve never visited before.
There’s the shared history of course, but in the UK in the last 30 years we’ve grown up on a diet of Neighbours, Crocodile Dundee, Steve Irwin and Kylie Minogue’s gold hot-pants. There’s also a constant stream of Aussies coming over to London and Brits going the other way.
So whilst the little things have added up on the journey to get here, that isn’t to say they no longer count. In fact, quite the opposite - it’s because of that familiarity the big things here are already pretty well known. It’s the smaller things that are the most interesting.
There’s the cost of everything, fuelled by a mining boom that’s now come to an end but still makes things even more expensive than back in London - the price of Big Mac meal has gone up from a celebratory £2.50 in Kuching to a whopping £6 in Perth. Bangers and mash in local pub in the middle of nowhere? £13. Full English at your local greasy spoon? £11. 250ml can of Coke? £1.
It’s a small insight into the costs of ‘boom and bust’ economics that the UK has been trying to leave behind for 30 years but that Australia only seems to be starting to get to grips with.
And there’s the outdoors lifestyle. After the high energy environment of Asia, it’s great to be in the kind of place that’s so big that you get just get totally lost and have total freedom to explore - sitting on the bike in the middle of a huge national park where the forest spreads all the way to the horizon, feeling just a little bit scared but also a bit thrilled when the reality dawns on you that if anything happened out here then no one would know about it for a long-time.
For the Aussie traveller, just exploring in a huge 4x4 Ute isn’t enough, oh no. You have to be towing a huge caravan with 4x4 tyres and a foldout area that looks like a military command post. Which, given how remote things can get, is probably justified.
Almost every group I’ve met is on some kind of major road trip, often for 6, 12 or 18 months. It’s not just retirees like Bead and Lou either - it’s a trio of couples in their late-20s with their kids, a group of guys literally fishing their way around the whole coast or an Army captain on leave from Canberra, riding solo across the Nullabor.
It seems to be a big part of the culture here and you can’t help but admire that - and it’s something I think we’ve lost in the UK in recent years, to our detriment.
Right now, it’s autumn - the delight at waking up on a drizzly Monday morning, cold, shivering in your tent and, when looking outside, not being greeted by a red ball of burning sun in a cloudless sky but a miserable, dull, overcast scene that casts a familiar grey-blue hue over everything.
But if there’s one thing that hits you right in the square eyes, its just how recent the place feels. Whether you’re riding the long miles through the Outback or reading about the history of a coastal town like Albany, Hopetoun or Esperance it strikes you how remarkable it is that, for better or for worse, a country so developed has literally been carved out of the landscape in less than a couple of hundred years.
That obviously has been a hugely controversial process and not without the negative consequences, but it is all the more striking when you contrast it with just how hard those countries en route to here are trying to catch up in terms of development.
