I’ve been living pretty easy this backpacking trip up the east coast of Australia. While blogging for The WORD Australia, I haven’t had to worry much about accommodation, setting up activities, even planning how to get from point A to point B (Thanks Benny!).

I was actually starting to feel a little bad about it the other day, like I was missing out on the real backpacker experience. I’ve “roughed” it through Europe and my first two months in Australia, so I know what it’s like. Listening to stories over barbie at my hostel in Emu Park, I started to miss those days. People were chatting about the 1 a.m. bus they took from Town of 1770,  among other things most of them struggled through during their trip up the east coast.

The next day, while driving from Emu Park to Airlie Beach, I mentioned this to Bobbi-Jo. Someone must have been listening to my terrible complaints, because it was as if we instantly hit a bump in the road.

About 20 minutes later we pulled up to a short line of traffic on Bruce Highway in Rockhampton, which is pretty much the only road that would take us to our destination. About 15 cars were at a standstill on the highway and people were getting out and walking to see what had happened. A tractor trailer go the “wobbles” coming down a hill on the highway. It sideswiped another car, which landed in the bushes.

Luckily, no one was hurt and the police, a fire truck and an ambulance quickly arrived. After hearing from a trucker that this kind of accident could take anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours to clean up. Bobbi-Jo and I decided to look for another route around it. We asked the trucker if there was one.

“There is if you know what your doing,” he said.

Hmmm, I thought maybe our questioning was off and if we asked a different way, he could help us find it. We tried again and he mentioned going around the caves and some hills and coming out to the highway on a road.

Not very helpful, but considering ourselves to be fairly smart girls, we figured we would take a swing at it. Plus, it looked like a few other cars had the same idea so we could just follow them.

We turned around and followed a road that passed Capricorn Caves. I wasn’t driving, so not really paying attention and for some reason in Australia I’ve kind of stopped caring so much about things like getting places and not getting lost, which I should fix considering people die driving in the Outback.

The road looked pretty barren, lots of farmland and not many houses. That didn’t bother me too much considering Bruce Highway, the main roadway in the country that goes almost all the way around the country is only two lanes and passes through small town centers, reducing the speed limit from 110 hm/h to 60 km/h. (Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Jersey anymore.)

So we’re driving down this detour for about 30 minutes and Bobbi-Jo asks, “Were we going a lot slower than those other cars?”

I’m not sure where or when but at some point in the half hour we lost the three cars ahead of us.

Our GPS stopped working about 20 minutes back, but the road was still black asphalt so we thought, ‘how off the grid could we be?’. Then the road ended and we had to make a choice in turns. Pretty easy considering the choice was between a paved road and a dirt road. Paved.

A little later, we saw signs directed towards military personnel. Thinking maybe they could help us, we followed the signs.

Then came the bridge.

It was only a small stream with cement bridge going over it, easy enough. Except the “bridge” was missing a chunk of pavement where it ended and the road began. We both looked at each other wondering if Benny could make it over the massive pot hole.

Then our GPS spoke.

“Follow 1 km and turn left.”

If the GPS says it than it must be true. With a little bump and grind, Benny made it across. Not long after, our GPS spoke again.

“Perform a u-turn whenever possible.”

Seriously?

Partially out of protest of electronics, but also unspoken curiosity, we decided to ignore the GPS’s advice.

We passed through a series of fences to find heaps of cows. They all stopped and stared at us. They looked at us as if we were the first car they’d seen in years, but there were some yellow street signs not far ahead, so Bobbi-Jo said she’d drive to them and if they didn’t say anything that would cause us to believe we were going in the right direction, we would turn around.

We drove. We stopped. We read. We performed a u-turn.

Driving back, we stopped and looked at the cows. They were skinny and we couldn’t see a farm house for miles. We thought maybe they were left there or even wild. I started whistling at them and they actually responded.

The group we were staring at stood up and started moving around. Then a heard that we didn’t even see started charging towards us. We watched amazed, then realized they were probably charging at us and it may be time to go.

Going 45 minutes out of our way, we so desperately wanted to find that road the trucker had told us to take (the one neither of us could remember) and get back on Bruce Highway past the accident pretending like this was just a short scenic detour. We couldn’t find it and our GPS was useless, so I said we should stop at the first farm we saw.

Bobbi-Jo mentioned something about this being the way the Texas Chainsaw Massacre started, but carrying my new “no worries” motto, I didn’t care. We drove up a long, dirty road to small tin farmhouse on a hill to find, not leather face, but someone that really didn’t want us on his property, coming to towards Benny. I asked him about Bruce Highway and he started to tell me the directions back to where this whole detour started. I tried to get a word in about a detour, but he wasn’t in the mood.

Fair enough. It was his property and we were bothering him on a Saturday afternoon. Maybe we were even bothering him murdering someone in the back of the house, but the point was, we had no choice but to turn around and go back where we started from.

Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad. After all, it had been almost an hour. We would get back to Bruce, the accident would be cleared and we got to see a side of Queensland most do not.

Wrong.

There was still a line of traffic, no cars were moving either way and the truck looked like it hadn’t been moved an inch. Since it was noon, we turned around again to grab lunch.

On the way back the second time we stopped and asked cops just sitting with their lights on, warning people to slow down, where we could grab something to eat.

“You can’t stop on a highway,” one said.

I looked back at two empty lanes and the barren landscape.

“There’s no one coming. There still not letting people through,” I said.

“They are,” he replied.

He must not have had his walk-talkie on. We continued, remembering a small general store we saw not too far back.

By the time we finished lunch, it was 12:30 p.m. and we were no more than 45 minutes from our starting point with at least four hours of driving ahead of us to get to Airlie Beach. We started our journey at 8 a.m., because for the first time we hadn’t planned accommodation at our next destination.

The rest of the drive went pretty smoothly. We arrived in Arlie around 5 p.m. and stopped at a desolate shopping center. Not sure where we were going we asked a taxi driver if he knew where YHA Airlie Beach was.

“In Airlie Beach,” he replied.

We decided that we were both done talking to people that day.

Arriving in Airlie Beach around 7 p.m. We parked and looked around a bit for accommodation. Not sure where to stay and not in the mood to pay, we returned to Benny to find the most glorious sight. Campervans and station wagons had pulled in all around us. (Wickeds, and Jucys, and Hippies! Oh, my!) It was as if everyone in Airlie Beach was sleeping on a street off Shore Harbour Road.

We chatted a bit with our neighbor in the blue station wagon, then went to town to drown our sorrows in a jug of margaritas.

The day wasn’t bad considering all the things that can go wrong when traveling and for me it was exhilarating. There something great about not knowing where you’re going to end up or how the day will unfold and almost always things seem to work out. That said, naturally I prefer a bed, shower and ceiling fan, so I’ll think before I want to complain again on this wonderful trip.