Day 8 - A Parallel Road to Nowhere

Sunday, 6 June 2021

The woman at the Tjukayirla Roadhouse is clear: they don’t know anything about the local roads. They’ve only just arrived from Perth a few days ago. They’d managed the roadhouse a few years back, but off-road travel wasn’t one of their past-times. It felt a lonely life to us, two 60-somethings keeping the small roadside enterprise going. Where was their family? The grandkids? We must have been their only customers this morning.

But in the hour and a half we spend reconnecting with email, internet, blogging, and trying to find road-conditions online, half a dozen 4WDs arrive, fuel up, buy snacks, share road stories with each other, and enjoy the pleasure of a real loo. Seen through the eyes of five days of solitude, the people look course, loud, boisterous. I recoil slightly. A pair of off-road motorbikes sit atop a ute. Their impact on the native bush far exceeds the tramping of cows and camels.

If you search for Parallel No. 2 Rd on Google Maps you might come up with a road in Pakistan, but nothing in the local area. Hema Maps makes it look like a road of significance, however, and it’s the one that will lead us back into the bush to meet up with the Connie Sue. 

It starts out gravelly and wide, then narrows, then grows bushy and overgrown with deep ruts and perilous certainty about its reliability. Reasonably new tyre tracks inspire us to think it must be possible. Yet the first 15 kms are stop and go, get out of the car, assess the situation, give it a go, -- success! -- and another few kilometres of manageable though ragged road before the next challenge. It makes the sweet Anne Beadell look like a sublimely smooth highway.

After two hours, the sun setting low, and having just navigated the latest ditch in the road, we park on a side road and set up camp. It’s a sparse landscape with long views. The blessed trill of crickets drowns out the incessant drone of the cosmic-om-sound (maybe it’s just a poetic version of tinnitus but we both hear it, and it’s pretty loud when there’s nothing but silence). Zebra finches flit about, suggesting there’s water nearby. Emptiness and sweet solitude regained.

The days grow shorter the further east we travel. By 5pm the horizon is peachy. Sparkly Venus sits five-fingers above where the sun just set. I light the lantern to make dinner. A circle of darkness envelops the camp, a boundary of safety, beyond which are imagined threats, unseen in the blackness. There is nothing here though, no people, no predators, only a quiet placid bush.
 

When dinner and washing up end for another day, we dim the lantern, flick off our headlamps, plop in the camp chairs and turn our gaze upwards. The boundary of darkness recedes as the mantel of prickly starlight bears down, lighting up the shadowed earth. We’re amazed how much we can see in a world devoid of artificial light, our night vision a rarely used sense.

Here's timelapse of stars twirling around the cosmic southern pole, taken with our new Nikon Coolpix P950:

Kinda fun...our twirling planet.