A few months back we hatched a cheeky desire to hitch hike to India. After a long list of to-do’s before we could set off, including moving the flerd 5 kms across town,
and hosting Jordan’s 30th and our farewell gathering,
we walked with our backpacks to the A300 and stuck out our thumbs. Ballarat was our first destination as we needed to head west before we could go north. Can you even hitch to India? Dunno, let’s find out.
Hitch hikers should be added to the list of rare breeds in Australia. As news cycles have merged into fear cycles, we get many worried looks when we hitch. Nonetheless, on this first morning we got a ride within 10 mins with a lovely lady named Cath, who dropped us off at Ballarat Station where we boiled the billy. Thanks for starting us off Cath!
We enquired about the cost of a train to Adelaide, and were sold tickets for a train and two buses, costing just $52.50 in total,
grateful for such affordability, and for the homemade, light-weight, high nutrition food we brought such as rabbit and roo jerky.
While this is a hitch hiking trip, we’ll take affordable transport should it come up. We were a little startled we got so far in just one day, and arriving on dusk in Adelaide, we were taken in by Nicole Brammy and her permie family. After a good night’s sleep in the backyard, we helped out with the household productions.
While Meg helped Nicole and Olivia sort walnuts, Patrick defrosted unwanted fish heads clogging up Nicole’s family freezer and converted them into a miso broth for the workers.
In the afternoon we packed up our tent from the backyard,
and headed a few hours south to spend the second night with old friends from Daylesford, Chris and Vanessa and their boys Willem and Alejandro, at their home in Willunga.
It was wonderful to connect with these families. In all we spent three nights in Adelaide and on our fourth day we caught a bus and a train north to the Salisbury Interchange from where we walked for about an hour out to the A1 to resume our thumbing adventure.
The only bus to Alice Springs from Adelaide would have cost us over a $1000, though more importantly, would have ruined our dance with chance. After two hours of waving in a friendly fashion at concerned motorists, Ali picked us up.
Ali is originally Afghani and he spent 6 months on Christmas Island before arriving in Australia. He said it was destiny that we met and he hoped he’d see us again. We felt the same. He dropped us off at Port Wakefield,
where we worked our thumbs hard for another two hours until Marie picked us up. Marie Warren, is a grandmother, artist and screen printer whose ancestral mob are the Arabana people. As we journeyed, she shared stories of the Mother Country we were travelling in, including the Seven Sisters story.
We talked about our ancestry, and Marie and Patrick (and therefore Woody) found they share Scottish roots. Marie’s grandfather is Francis Warren, formally a Scot before becoming a fully initiated Arabana man who, as Marie stated proudly, was a fierce fighter in the Frontier Wars in Central Australia. As we travelled and spoke about our shared lineage, a giant serpent appeared in a salt lake to our right, looking much like Uilebheist Loch Nis (the Loch Ness Monster). We pulled over for a gander.
Travelling with Marie was akin to entering a mythological adventure. We laughed and cried and shared story. After dusk Marie dropped us off at the caravan park on the west side of Port Augusta. “You’ll be safe there, “ she told us,
and we shared some more tears and words. “We need you white fellas,” she said with big feeling. “The dealers use Aboriginal street kids here as guinea pigs when they bring a new drug into the country,” she said with gravity. “I want to come see your bush school, see how you do it. That’s what our babies need here.”
We white fellas need you too, Marie, though many of us have lost connection to a land- and story-bonded life so we no longer know why we do.
After our emotional farewell we found the caravan and camping park was full, even for a small hiking tent, so heeding Marie’s warning about the town we avoided seeking out a sneaky camp, and headed instead for the Flinders Hotel and booked the cheapest room in town.
Early that morning we began our day’s labour, switching our ‘Alice’ sign for something more modest. We were finding out just what huge distances we needed to travel,
and we were in for the long game. It took us four hours before we got a ride, a perfect opportunity for catching practice.
While we waited to fill up a car already committed for a northern transit, an Indian taxi driver pulled over and asked us if we needed a ride. We got talking about our attempt to travel to India overland, hitch hiking and crewing on a boat from Darwin to visit our friend, Jashan’s family farm in Punjab and stay with his parents in his childhood village, visit Vandana Shiva’s farm Navdanya and other permaculture farms in the north, and to cut our teeth on the streets of India playing cricket.
Yes, we’ve become a cricket family since Blackwood fell in love with the game. Here’s Woody practicing his batting with a round bat he carved from hazel wood just before we left,
and here he is, just 11 years old, belting his dad around in the Hepburn cricket nets a few weeks back.
The taxi driver was so moved by the story of our attempt to get to his ancestral lands he returned an hour later to check on us and to give us a wad of cash. Our initial refusal caused some awkwardness, and we realised the gift dearly wanted to be given so we accepted with grace and much gratitude. This generous soul left before we shared names, and he said on parting, “I’m not wealthy, but it’s in my religion. Go well.”
Not long after this immense act of kindness, and about four hours in total out on the road, a young fella called Adrian (or A-train to his mates), stopped, picked us up, and drove us into what is called The Outback.
Adrian was heading to his mother’s engagement party near Roxby Downs and said he’d be happy for the company. We travelled for about an hour together before he needed to turn off, so he dropped us at Spuds Roadhouse on the Stuart Highway,
where we once again got out our hitching sign.
We were pretty buggered. None of us had slept well so far on the trip. Roxby Downs, Woomera, these are big names we adults know through news stories only.
But, we’re not really here to drift, it’s become apparent.
We were going to spend the winter curled up by the fire, working on our book, which the growing, harvesting and teaching seasons helped to put on the back burner. But a few months ago India called us and we had to pay attention to that.
While labouring with our thumbs out on this long road, we also paid attention to the changing colours of Mother Country.
Nearing dark, two Frenchies, Loren and Enzo, pulled over.
They were on a 300km round trip to do their food shopping, and told us there was a free camp site where they worked at Glendambo. So they dropped us there, on that red earth,
and with their joie de vivre spirit we set up camp, got a fire going,
cooked dinner, played some songs, and passed out under a magnificent desert sky.
By the next morning our tent was drenched in dew. It was the first time damp had permeated our family house on the road. We cooked a seedy oaty porridge for breakfast while waiting for the sun to dry our gear,
utilising the shrubbery as a makeshift dryer.
Our night in Glendambo was an initiation into the desert, at least from a settler’s point of view.
We decided we’d pack up the tent wet and get going early. We hoped to get to Coober Pedy and stood out on the Stuart Highway again to roll the hitch dice.
To the west of our frugality was this land and this sky.
Little rituals of acknowledgement and connection are playing out through the waiting. When Woody needs a little encouragement on these long waits, we remind him that if we travelled fast and assuredly we’d need a lot of money, therefore he’d be sent to school so his parents could earn it, and he’d miss out on all the chance encounters that were already making this trip so rich.
After a few hours of courting the wild twin on the Stuart Highway, Steve and Sue, caravaners from WA, picked us up. Covid dissidents like us, we had plenty to talk about, and politics filled our journey akin to this graffiti we discovered in a public toilet on the Stuart.
We adults in the car were all Greens voters back in the day – environmental lefties. While we travelled, we collectively lamented how few now are reading this aggregating era of regulatory capture and the systemic corruption in the state-corporate nexus. Needless to say neither Green, Blue, or Red are parties any of us trust and are repulsed by their complicity.
Sue and Steve, salts of the earth, rolled us into Coober Pedy,
a dusty old mined-to-hell-and-back town,
where we set up the tent and dried out our wet things before the sun lost its sting. Each day is getting warmer as we progress north.
The temperatures drop at night but we’re toasty with all our winter gear. Once set up we explored the town
that has been turned over and
mongreled in both crude and novel ways.
You know what they say when you travel, As in Rome… so we donned the digger’s spirit,
for a very brief moment, and got the hell outta that strange lil town,
passing Waa on our way,
and walking 45mins back to the highway to begin our morning’s labour.
We smiled and waved to motorists, and received a goodly assortment of friendliness back in return. Being three of us plus our gear, not many people have the space. What we gain in being friendly, we lose by being numerous and bulky. It took two hours before a car pulled over. “I can give you a lift. You’re not psycho-killers are you?” asked Shannon, “No, are you?” Meg asked back, with a grin.
“We’re going to Alice,” said Patrick. “Yeah, I can take you there, I’m heading to Darwin,” said Shannon. Did someone say Darwin?! We piled in, so immensely grateful for the ride and for the dog named Rocky.
Over the next four days we lived on the road with Shannon and Rocky,
visiting Alice only briefly,
and camping at roadside free camps.
Shannon didn’t turn out to be a psycho-killer. He’s a kind and generous man, and we got to do a lot of yarning,
and as our shared stories deepened and grew, so too the termite mounds the more we travelled north.
On our last morning together we stopped in to Bitter Springs
for a refreshing swim, the water almost the same as our body temperature.
We travelled far with Shannon and Rocky, over four beautiful days. On our last leg-stretch before Darwin we stopped and took a family snap.
Shannon and Rocky are about to embark on a new life up here. Shannon will be driving trucks out to remote communities for an Aboriginal transport company, and Rocky will travel with him.
We farewelled this awesome man and his dog outside the Dinah Beach Yacht Association, in Darwin
and walked through the gates into the next stage of our adventure.
Thank you to everyone who waved and smiled at us on the road, who gave us rides and took us in. And thank you Dear Reader, for accompanying us on this first leg of our adventure.
And thanks to Jordan for the first and third images, and to Kim for the second.
