The Road Less Travelled
1st February 2009
Latitude 36'40, Longitude 149'50
Start Mileage: 9587km
Finish Mileage: 10813km
Fuel reading: 7.6/100kms
Trip Notes: GPS peril, logging roads and the east coast again
The problem with taking the road less travelled was always how long it would take you to get back from the pot holed, uninhabited dead end to which the road likely lead. At least with the highway, you knew where you stood. The most adventure that a driver could realistically hope for was a side trip to one of the excommunicated highway towns that had erected “scenic route” road signs, thus enabling weekenders to quickly calculate the potential benefit of discovering something wonderful with the cost of delay and emotional trauma at discovering nothing (or worse).
The GPS changed everything. The glorious benefits of risk-free risk became instantly available to the masses. No longer was ‘the road less travelled’ the exclusive precinct of poets, artists and people of unlimited time. The road was ours for the taking! And take it, we did. The Skoda Octavia Scout roared into the unknown. Freedom propelled our engines. We gunned east through middle Victoria and down the Pyrenees Highway, stopping for fuel in the one street towns, and skirting the rest. Golden agricultural lands rolled past our window. Big driving tunes drowned the car. Coldplay, Beck, Chisel. We were well on our way to doing 1000km in one day. And then the horizon rolled up into the mountains and we entered the labyrinth of the Alpine National Park.
The roads grew narrow and shadows fell upon our path. Alpine vegetation blocked our view, but the GPS pointed us confidently towards the high roads. It took us three hours to travel 54 kilometres, and twice we ran into a ditch to avoid a gigantic logging truck, but oh the experience. We wound our way through burned out forests dotted with yellow flowers, rode past red and purple hills, came out above the clouds, and watched as they sucked and swirled madly below us. And then finally, when we could take no more of beauty or potholes, we arrived at a deserted town that shall remain nameless, where bar and till sat open, and not a soul could be raised. We drank a coke and put the money on the counter, and I presume that’s what all the locals do. And that, my friends, made all the difference!
We were spat out at Lake’s Entrance, just north of ninety mile beach, with eyes glazed and hair ruffled. The car was caked in the fine brown silt of middle earth. We didn’t know where we were or where we had been, only that there was no possibility of return. Lee Pemberton knows how that feels. She came up to the sleepy south coast town of Bega on holiday over a decade ago, and now runs one of the most successful contemporary dance companies for youth in regional Australia. “The locals must have thought you were mad,” I said, but she shrugged. “Not really. There are a lot of sea changers here, and locals that used to live in the city.... but they did take bets on how long it would be before I gave up and went home.”
She didn’t. fLing is into its second graduate year, and at least eight former dancers are now enrolled in Australia’s major dance schools. It’s easy to imagine Lee being credited by some of them in the future... I started dancing because of this amazing teacher called Lee.... There are no stodgy interpretations of Swan Lake or the Nutcracker Suite. Instead she choreographs pieces like Sick, where her young dancers perform in the bowl of the local skateboard rink. Or Habitat, where they interpret Australian wildlife.
Our East coast adventures ended with a sunset beer at Tathra. We sat silently as the sky turned to a pale orange and the ocean grew dark. Lee’s story had moved me. The clichés about regional Australia continued to fall away. We were at serious risk of thinking that there was not a single redneck in the whole country! I wondered what we would find in Alice Springs, and whether we were ready for the journey ahead. We had twelve days to travel 7000km and we had barely thought about it. After our alpine labyrinth, I wasn’t so much worried about the Skoda Octavia Scout, as our collective sanity. The road was long. The mind wanders. Isolation can make people peculiar. “Do you think we are spiritually prepared?” I asked the assistant earnestly. But his mind was on more earthly matters. He looked sideways at me, swigged back his beer and said severely, ‘There will be no more Coldplay James.’