Glenn Torrens makes the most of a bad situation
Well, that didn’t go according to plan. Around now, I thought I’d be sharing with you readers some words and pics about a charity outback trek through some of Australia’s beautiful central desert country in my mate Tony’s VW Baja Bug. This would have been the second time I’d been on one of these treks after I helped Tony build the off-road Bug a few years ago.
The 2022 Road Boss Rally began in Tasmania and finished at Dundee Beach, up near Darwin. Tony and another mate, Phil, did the Sydney-Tassie-Alice section of the trek and I flew to Alice Springs to swap seats with Phil for the trek’s red-centre to top-end section.
After a not-very-nice year, I wanted to relax and play tourist around Australia’s stunning central city for a while so I arrived in Alice a few days early. I booked a caravan park cabin, hired a little car and visited such places as the original telegraph station, the old hospital, the School of the Air and a couple of indigenous significant sites.
While relaxing with a beer the evening before Tony and Phil were due to arrive, I received a text message.
“Good news,” the message began. “The body is solid. Not good news… we need to rebuild the engine.”
Oh.
Sure enough, the next afternoon Tony, Phil and the broken Bug arrived at Alice after a 300km ride in, and on, a flatbed truck. Rolled off the truck and pushed into a shed (owned, quite handily, by the rally’s Alice-based organiser, Jamie) we ripped into diagnosing and – hopefully – fixing the Bug.
Tony – who was damn disappointed – told of a terminal knocking sound from the engine, and its left side was covered in oil. Over the next few hours, we discovered bits of metal in the sump and as we removed the air-cooled engine’s air ducts, I discovered the reason: a rock had pierced the engine oil cooler, allowing the oil to be pumped out and starving the engine bearings.
For this engine, in this car, for this trek, it was game over.
But neither of us – especially me! – was yet ready to leave the balmy temps of the Northern Territory to go home to NSW’s mid-winter dreariness. So we hired a diesel trade-spec ute (the only vehicle available!) and did a ‘pub crawl’ from Alice Springs to Darwin, visiting almost every roadhouse and plenty of tourist attractions along the way, with Midnight Oil and King Stingray rocking from the ute’s speakers.
Eventually, we met up with the remaining trek participants at NT’s Dundee Beach for tropical sunset beers and a terrific end-of-trek celebration dinner at the pub overlooking the beach. We swagged adjacent to the cars. After another day or two of relaxing in a waterside tropical holiday park, we returned Thrifty’s Triton and flew home from Darwin.
Even after the disappointment of the broken engine, even though we missed a few nights camping with the other trekkers, even though we were in a late-model ute on the bitumen and not the Baja Bug through a desert, we made the most of things.
Cruising up the Stuart Highway with my mate Tony for a week was one of the best road trips I’ve ever done!
From Unique Cars #473, Dec 2022/Jan 2023