Aussie Homecoming Taking the long way home aboard an ancient Pajero

YOU ONLY LIVE THRICE

When it’s time to go home after living the expat dream in Australia, you could do the sensible thing and hop on a plane… or make an adventure of it and prepare your truck for the expedition of a lifetime. You only live once, after all… unless you’re the truck in question, a 245,000-km Pajero that had already been written off not once but twice…

Words and pictures: Richard and Sophie Morgan

Abit more than a decade ago, we realised a dream by getting jobs in Australia. For a thirty-something British couple, it was our chance to enjoy a fantastic lifestyle of year-round sunshine, beaches and partying with newfound friends.

The life we lived Down Under was all about making the most of every day. And for that, what we needed was a big, cheap truck we could pack our friends, beers and surfboards into and head to the beach for the weekend!

After a bit of looking, a few dollars bought us Kylie – an old knockabout Mitsubishi Pajero from 1996 with a recently rebuilt V6 engine and 245,000 kilometres on the clock. Not much on her worked well, or at all, but we set to fi xing her up as best we could and in return she took us to some incredible places as we toured our adopted home.

Time passes, though. We started thinking about things like kids and

sensible thing and hop on a plane… or make an adventure of it and prepare your truck question, a 245,000-km Pajero that had already been written off not once but twice…

mortgages and, much as we loved Australia, we knew that there’s no substitute for family. It was time to go home.

Where did that leave Kylie? In most cases, for sale (possibly even for scrap). But we’d already had so many adventures together… and with a journey back home to Britain on the cards, we started having ideas. We wanted to drive around the world – a 25,000-mile journey across first Australia, then Africa and finally Europe.

Most people want to go overlanding first, so they buy a truck to do it in. For us, it was the truck that came first: we already have the means to do it, we thought, so why not?

Well, more than a quarter of a million kilometres’ worth of wear and tear would be one reason why not. A decade and a half of ageing might be another. The fact that Kylie is a Mitsubishi, not a Toyota, so parts are less readily available when you need them in the back of beyond. Oh yes, that engine rebuild was

Left, above: Even by the average gold-rush standards, Silverton’s boom and bust happened at breakneck speed. Today it only has a few dozen inhabitants – but its role as a location for many cult films, most notably the Mad Max series, has given it a new lease of life as a peculiar kind of tourist attraction Above right: Plane Henge is one of the most distinctive exhibits in Mutonia Sculpture Park, which you pass on the way to Oodndatta. The park was conceived by local artist Robin Cooke, who created a range of weirdly amusing sculptures out of waste Right: This isn’t a joke. Lake Eyre Yacht Club really does go sailing, but the lake needs to have some water in its first. In 2010, the club held its first full regatta here since 1976, but enough floodwater usually reaches the lake for some sailing to happen every couple of years or so

required after the previous owner blew it up. And sometime after buying her, we discovered that she’d already been written off not once but twice by insurance companies – first due to what they referred to as ‘malicious damage’ and then because of flooding.

You’d have to be mad, right? Well, maybe. But how many people spend their lives waiting for something and in the end never get to do it? Do you dream from behind a desk, or take the chance when you’re able to grab it with both hands? We’ve already got close friends battling cancer, we thought: life really is too short.

We decided to start with Australia itself. But this wasn’t any travel-lite dry-run: it would be the first leg of our expedition proper, with the truck fully prepped and packed, and there’d be no going back. We’d zigzag our way across Australia, taking in the places we hadn’t been yet during our time there, before reaching Perth – where we’d put Kylie on a container for Africa and drive her home from there. The Aussie leg would be about learning, but it would be an expedition in itself.

We mentioned prep there, and there was a lot of it. Even if you’re starting with a brand new vehicle, this is a huge undertaking, but we had an old girl to nurse home and she needed a lot of TLC just to bring her up to scratch.

We’ve listed some of the mods we made elsewhere on these pages. A trip like this is not cheap, so wherever possible we saved money by using reconditioned bits, second-hand stuff from eBay and cheap copies of pricier originals.

The electrical system is a crucial part of any modern expedition truck. But rather than spending a fortune on this, we figured it out for ourselves over lots of weekends after learning how to do it by watching videos on YouTube.

We also made our own storage system, saving thousands of dollars on the cost of a pro fit-out. We stripped out the second and third rows of seats and bought the tools and materials we’d need to build a set-up including electrics, fridge, large drawer, pull-out table, bag and food storage. We even fully upholstered the whole thing, and we were pretty chuffed with the finished result – having learned how to do that, we figured, we’d be able to cope with anything the road threw at us!

That’s what you need as an overlander – a positive outlook. Richard only took a couple of days to demonstrate this by setting his head on fire while trying to reset a gas bottle on the cooker as we camped in Mungo National Park.

Alarming, you might say, but it’s all good lessons in life: ‘Don’t lean over flammable things when trying

Above left: The Great Walls of China, in Mungo National Park, were formed when a prehistoric lake dried up Above right: St Mary’s Peak stands almost three quarters of a mile above sea level. Hiking to the summit in the heat of the Australian bush is not something you want to undertake lightly – especially if the only exercise you’ve been getting recently is climbing in and out of your expedition truck. Six hours of hard work await… but the view from the top is worth the pain

Breaking down in the Outback really is something you want to rule out of your life. Any of the companies that specialise in helping people prepare for expeditions will tell you that knowing how to maintain your vehicle is one of the most valuable skills you can take with you. A towing strap will come in useful too, though – a helping hand showed up in the shape of a cheerful local in a ute here on the Oodndatta Track, but as it turned out the Pajero was being prevented from starting by nothing more complex than a loose connection to the starter

One of these vehicles has been written off twice in its life. See if you can guess which one…

to light them’ is one we won’t forget for some time to come…

Another early panic came courtesy of Kyle’s twin petrol tanks, which use a pump-fed auxiliary. Arriving in Tocumwal State Forest on the Murray River, we got out to find that we’d left the pump on – which had eventually built up enough pressure to engage the overflow system. That’ll be something else we won’t forget in a hurry, then – seeing your precious fuel pouring away is a pretty terrifying experience until you figure out why.

Talking of pumps, our first night of wild camping featured a real eureka moment when we dropped our water hose in the Murray, filled the tank and waited with baited breath to see what would come out of the filter. Pure water – amazing! After all our hard work installing the system, you’ve no idea how sweet it tasted!

Mungo National Park was our first real taste of the remoteness you get in Australia – being so used to city life, it was unsettling to start with. But seeing your first Big Red kangaroos, and watching wild emus running alongside your car, is quite some compensation for that – as are the Great Walls of China, huge rock formations left behind by an ancient lake system as it dried up 20,000 years ago.

Between here and Broken Hill, the tracks gave us a taste of what lay ahead. Over the endless corrugations, the rule is simple: if it’s not bolted down, it’s coming off. But we made it, and after a day in the famous mining town we pressed on towards the Flinders Ranges.

Here’s a fascinating fact: the ‘broken’ hill itself is gone these days. It’s been mined to nothingness – very much what happens when the news spreads that someone’s discovered silver ore.

A much smaller mining town just outside Broken Hill is Silverton, where we camped for the night. Like so many places out here, the boom to bust cycle was so fast that by the time the town had started to establish itself, it was already dead.

The Outback is full of ruined settlements that are less than 100 years old, but Silverton has another claim to fame. It’s been the set of dozens of films and TV shows – most notably the Mad Max movies. For a town of less than 50 residents, it gets a lot of visitors intrigued to find so much crazy memorabilia in such a bizarre setting. It really does feel very ‘wild west’ out here, with roaming camels and emus adding to the feeling of remoteness.

We took the back route into the Flinders Ranges, where Wilpena Pound is a great base for exploring. We’d been warned that the overlanding lifestyle can take its toll on your fitness, so a six-hour hike to the 1120-metre summit of St Mary’s Peak was a welcome chance to stretch our legs. The utter exhaustion that followed wasn’t so much fun, but at least the views were worth the slog!

Talking of slog, the next section of our route was a 4000-kilometre hike north. There were highlights, of course – Lake Eyre and Oodndatta (Australia’s hottest town), for example, as well as the incomparable sight of Uluru – but one of the most memorable episodes was actually one of the scariest, too.

After a night at Coward Springs campsite, we jumped aboard Kylie and… click. Nothing. The starter motor was only three months old but it was getting power, so we figured it must have been killed by the endless corrugations of the Oodndatta Track. So we fitted our spare and… click. Nothing. Uh-oh. Fortunately, a couple of guys who’d also been camping had come over to help. We say it was fortunate because one of them offered to tow us all the way to Marree – about 125 miles away. It took three and a half hours on the bone-jarring track, but finally we rolled into town, dusty and pebble-dashed from being roped to their truck.

So, there’s a mechanic in town? ‘Sure, mate. He’s on holiday. Back in a month.’ Wonderful.

Some hours later, with Sophie reading the Haynes manual out loud, the penny dropped. The starter has two positive connections: one from the ignition and one from the battery. The solenoid was working but the motor wasn’t… and yes, that’s all it was, a wire shaken loose by all those corrugations. The culprit was hidden beneath the connection to the battery terminal, and a quick tighten-up was all it needed. Phew!

You need to like corrugations to drive in the Outback. Pausing for the night north of Alice Springs at Tilmouth Well Roadhouse, we were all ready to hit the notorious Tanami Track the next day. Checking on the road conditions, we had been told that the track was currently in an okay condition, but in the back of our minds we still had a niggling feeling as so many people had told us how rough it could be. Still, this is the most direct route from Alice to the Kimberley – a 1000-kilometre short-cut, in other words – so it was worth a crack.

If you Google the Tanami, you’ll see results with headings like ‘The road to hell’ and ‘The worst road in the world.’ The year before our trip, a campaign was set up to have it surfaced, with stories of new cars being scrapped at a year old and suggestions that its condition is so bad it’s actually contributing to the cycle of welfare dependency among the area’s Aborigines.

Now we know why. Up at 5am the next day, we set out – and almost as soon as our wheels hit the gravel, the corrugations began. Relentless, bone-shaking corrugations that jar every inch of your body. Regular users don’t just talk of suspension damage, but of panels being shaken off their vehicles. The Pajero has a proud history in the Dakar Rally, but we were genuinely worried for Kylie’s survival. And with it, obviously, ours. It might have been ‘off-road,’ but this wasn’t off-roading: it was torture.

We knew it before either of us said it. Hundreds of kilometres of this? No way. Before we got any further in, we were baling.

It was frustrating at the time. We had done a 300-kilometre round trip

Lapping up the opportunity to enjoy a hot shower and a comfy bed when your expedition has come to an end doesn’t mean you’ve gone soft. It just means that dust, corrugations and the dunny have become a little too much like everyday reality…

The Tropic of Capricorn marker is located around 30 miles north of Alice Springs on the Stuart Highway. It was built in 1988 to commemorate the bicentennary of European settlement in Australia

just to get to Tilmouth Well, and on top of that we were adding a further 1500km to go round the top. But we soon found our silver lining – the realisation that missing out on the Tanami meant we could instead do the Gibb River Road.

Better still, there was another shortcut via the Buchanan Highway – another unpaved road, but this time a beautiful drive through Big Sky country featuring a gem of a free camping spot towards the end of the track in Jasper Gorge.

Heading into Kununurra, we stocked up on supplies and prepared the car for the Gibb River Road. We prepared ourselves, too, by staying an extra day, as the pace we’d been moving at was starting to get to us. When you’re planning a trip like this on a map, the theory of driving so many kilometres a day sounds fi ne, but in reality it’s full-on. Australia is a BIG place!

The Gibb River Road is an old beef route for driving cattle the 700 kilometres between Wyndham and Derby. The seasons are extreme out here, with the dry, arid landscapes quickly becoming impassable during the wet season. This year, the Northern Territories hadn’t had its typical monsoon season so, although we hit the track at the beginning of its open season, the water levels were very low.

In some ways, that was a blessing as it made the drive much easier. But it was disappointing, too, that we wouldn’t get to experience the real challenge of fording the Pentecost and Durack. Both are legendary for being long, deep, croc-infested river crossings but, as we passed through, the water barely covered Kylie’s wheels.

We stayed at Ellenbrae Station that night, a quirky little place with an amazing outdoor shower, toilet and bathtub! For the fi rst time on the entire trip, the moon wasn’t up, meaning that the stars in the sky were just immense. We spent the whole of the night just staring up at them, and the lack of water in the day’s river crossings soon seemed very insignifi cant.

It was now more than three weeks since Richard set his head on fi re, and his eyebrows were growing back nicely. So it was about time for another near-calamity. After an afternoon’s swimming in a crystal-clear waterhole, we set a campfi re to cook dinner – only for the fl ames to leap over the rock fi replace and on to the surrounding grass. Instantly, they were spreading, so fast that we couldn’t throw water on them quickly enough. Our shovel was still bolted to the Pajero’s back door, and the fi re was out of control.

Thankfully, the site caretaker and his wife had seen what was happening. They came running, each armed with a spade, and frantically shovelled dirt over the spreading fl ames. As fast as it had spread, the fi re was out again – but not before burning out a huge patch of grass and coming within feet of the car! Aghast at what could have happened, we learned our lesson: always clear the area properly, and

Prepping the Pajero

Kylie may have seen a lot of use and abuse before we bought her, but we did a huge amount of prep work to ready her for the journey to come. The following list isn’t comprehensive, but it gives you an idea of what it took to get her this far:

Off-road

• Engine totally rebuilt 40,000km ago • Restored ARB bull bar from eBay • Tough Dog dual recovery points welded into chassis • 2.5” suspension lift using Dobinsons front torsion bars and +250kg rear coils • Raw 4x4 Nitro Max 41mm bore heavy-duty twin-tube shocks • Cheap Safari Snorkel copy from eBay, plus extended diff and tranny breathers • Davis Craig heavy-duty transmission cooler • Refurbished 147-litre Long Ranger fuel tank with 50-litre auxiliary • 265/75R16 Cooper ST tyres

Camping

• UHF radio • 1.6-metre Echo roof tent on full-length rack, with 2x2.5-metre awning • Triple battery system with 2 x Ultimate 100Ah batteries for camping lights and fridge • 300W inverter and LED cabin lights • Electric hook-up for camp sites with mains supply • Home-made fridge slide and drawer system with pull-out table and food storage • 80-litre water storage with Doulton carbon ceramic micro fi lter and 12v pump

On top of this, we treated the vehicle to a programme of mechanical refurbishments to bring her back up to scratch. These included a new radiator, alternator, starter motor, timing belt, water pump, wheel bearings, fan and belts, reconditioned auto box, all new suspension bushes, replacement switches for the ‘Super-Select’ 4x4 system and new tie rods and rocker cover seals.

The commonest thing in the world when prepping a vehicle is convincing yourself that this will be the last thing you have to buy. I can’t need anything ELSE, can I…?!

have your shovel to hand before you strike a match.

At Cape Keraudren, we stayed at an amazing campsite managed by a warden and his pet kangaroos. All were rescue cases who he’d nursed back to health, but following their recovery they’d decided life was pretty good with him and that they’d stick around.

Every expedition is replete with stories like this, and they’re what make the experience so magical. But now we were coming towards the end of our Australian voyage – and, with the trip clicking round to 10,000 kilometres, at long last we arrived at Ningaloo.

The Ningaloo Reef has World Heritage site status for the abundance of its marine life. We had been dreaming of this moment for a long, long time: the snorkelling here turned out to be some of the best we’d ever done, and swimming with whale sharks was full-on bucket-list territory, so our excitement levels were going through the roof.

As if all that wasn’t enough, as we packed up one morning a guy came running over to say he’d got bogged in the sand and could we pull him out. It was like music to Richard’s ears – he just loves a rescue! So off we set to pull out the stricken dad and his three children – it was good to be on the other end of the tow rope for once!

We got another chance to be heroes a few days later in Francois Peron National Park, having come upon a stuck car and trailer while seeing what Kylie could do in soft sand. That gave us a great confi dence boost for the future legs of our journey – as did the chance to use our Maxtrax recovery ladders, which we were keen to do as often as possible to get good value from what are the most expensive pieces of plastic we’ve ever bought!

We had little doubt that Africa was going to hold plenty of opportunities for the Maxtrax, and Kylie herself, to do us proud. But as we rolled in to Perth with just under 12,000 kilometres behind us, it was hard to believe that six weeks had gone by already.

We had learned a lot from the fi rst part of our expedition. Living out of your car certainly takes some getting used to, and never being more than a foot apart from each other can be testing on even the strongest relationships! However, we soon found that we naturally fell into a new routine, each fi nding our own role in the day-to-day business of setting up camp, cooking, looking after the car, planning routes and so on.

With Kylie tucked up in a container and two weeks to kill before her arrival in Africa, we fi nally had some time to relax. Saying goodbye at Fremantle docks was like waving off your fi rst born – but that meant a fortnight of comfy beds, fl ushing toilets and hot showers! Bliss…

You really do appreciate the simple things in life when you’ve been camping for so long. But the converse is also true: the simple things make you appreciate the joy of being out there, too. Those beds sure were comfy – but already, a big part of us was just itching to get back on board Kylie and get back on to the long trail home.

www.againstmalaria.com/morgansafari

The authors chose to support the Against Malaria Foundation as a way of giving something back during their expedition. Malaria is a completely preventable disease, yet more than a million people die from it every year: the charity raises money to buy mosquito nets which are distributed across Africa to where they’re needed most, and Sophie and Richard hope that by spreading the word, they’ll help raise the sort of funds that’ll make a real difference in terms of saving lives. A donation of £2.50 buys one net – if you can spare something, the web address above would be a fi ne place to put it. And if you want to know more about the trip, you can pay a visit to the authors’ own site at www. morgansafari.com.