jan/feb 2012

Exploring Tanami

by Josh Boltrek

Mid-life crisis? Perhaps. My Toyota Trails had just arrived in the post. I stared at it and felt that excitement which I have felt every other month for a very long time. I have been a member of TLCA since 1993–nearly half my life. I began to reflect on what I had accomplished in my life and my experiences since joining the TLCA—isn't that what one does when having a mid-life crisis?

In 1993, I had just graduated from the University of Colorado; the world was my oyster. I had a 1983 FJ40 with factory power steering and factory air. I had owned it for three years and it was my second FJ40. Since then, I have flown dispersal planes in Central America, been a Captain on a regional jet for an airline in the United States, gone to law school, had a son and now practice law in Australia.

I try to keep life interesting—which I prefer to the expression, "Jack of all trades, master of none." I have always tried to live my life in a way that would not leave me wanting more when it was all over. Careers come and go but Land Cruisers are a constant. My mother and father bought a 1972 FJ40 brand new at Stevinson Toyota in Denver and we still have that car in the family. I have driven Cruisers since I got my license and now I have a 1984 FJ40 LX and a 1984 HJ47 Troopy.

My good friend Phil is a geologist for a uranium exploration company in Australia. He was working on a project in the Tanami Desert, which is in the Northern Territory. Phil asked me if I would like to help him for a couple of months. Realizing that my life had taken a decidedly sedentary turn since moving to Australia, I knew a great opportunity when I heard it.

I would fly into Alice Springs, pick up a company truck and then drive 3-½ hours northwest into the desert through the MacDonnell Ranges. The camp was very remote–in the middle of Aboriginal land–and there was only a generator for power and a well for water. Phil added as an afterthought, "Oh, you'll probably like the rig you'll be driving. It's a 2011 Land Cruiser Ute." I heard the voice of Henry David Thoreau in my head: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." I was sold.

I arrived on a spectacular "winter" day. Alice Springs sits in the middle of Australia at 2,000-feet of elevation and reminds me in some ways of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The hills around Alice Springs have a very Southwest feel to them. It has that sense of being a place where people come to hide out, disappear or re-invent themselves; a place where being different is a virtue. There is also that terrible underbelly that the extreme poverty of the Aboriginals gives the place, which is so much like many parts of the American Southwest.

My first impression when I saw the new Cruiser was that the design is still distinctly Land Cruiser 70 series but it is no longer obviously related to the 40 series. The rig that I was driving had only covered 7,000 miles and still smelled new–Toyota new. There is a certain smell that a Toyota used to have in the U.S. when they came with vinyl floors and vinyl seats, which they no longer seem to have in the States. It is a smell which I remember my dad's brand new 1978 Hilux having back in Colorado on the day he drove it home from Lyons Toyota in Boulder.

I stood at the open driver's door staring at the utilitarian interior—it even had vent windows! I put the key in the ignition and started that wonderful 4.5 litre D4-D V8 diesel engine. The D4-D was soon purring like a large, very powerful kitten, idling at 500 RPM. I looked around the cab: driver and passenger air bags, adjustable steering wheel, crank windows and simple dashboard air vents. The steering wheel on this new Cruiser has a chrome Toyota bull's head emblem and not "Land Cruiser" stamped into the horn button as it was on the HDJ79—more Camry than Cruiser but still very Toyota.

I left the parking area and headed out of town. The air conditioning worked perfectly, the gearbox shifted effortlessly and the cab was very quiet and comfortable (which is saying something for me–I'm 6'6" and there are not many regular cab pickups in which I can sit comfortably). Once out of town, I quickly accelerated to 80 mph and noted that the engine was turning over about 3,000 RPM in 5th gear; with a redline of 4,500, this felt fairly comfortable. The Cruiser snapped up to speed and drove very comfortably–so comfortably, in fact, that it was very easy to let the speed creep up over 95 mph unintentionally.

I turned west onto the Tanami Highway about 20 miles out of town. This is where the road turns to a single lane of pavement (or "bitumen" in Australia). This type of road is very common in Outback Australia, only wide enough for one car and covers only the crown of the road. When another car comes toward you, both cars slow slightly and pull to their left until their outside wheels drop into the dirt on the side of the road, leaving only their inside wheels on the bitumen.

I continued on this road until I arrived at Tilmouth Well, where I stopped to lock the hubs—yes, locking hubs on a 2011 Toyota. The dirt roads in this part of Australia are covered in two to six inches of very fine bulldust, which is ancient sand with a consistency akin to a mixture of talcum powder and table salt. Driving on these roads feels a bit like driving on a sub-zero, snow covered road that has not been plowed but has been heavily driven. To add to the fun, semi trucks called "road trains," with three full-size trailers in tow, go barrelling by in the other direction periodically, rendering visibility to less than a few hundred feet. The Land Cruiser blazed over this road like it was pavement.
Eventually I was on a single lane dirt road with ruts and 3-foot tall weeds on either side. On the odd occasion when there was traffic coming from the other direction, it required one vehicle to pull off into the weeds and let the other vehicle go by. The general etiquette seems to be that the car that is best suited to going into the scrub pulls over.

I then turned onto a small track that looked more like a goat path than a road; it was marked simply with a ribbon, just as I was told. This "road" continued for a further 10 miles until I arrived at the camp.
Phil came out of the office and welcomed me to camp. Aussies can be very colorful characters and the blokes at camp were no exception. Phil showed me to my room and told me that tea (supper in Australia) would be ready in an hour.
The next day began for us before sunrise. My first adventure was to follow Phil down twenty miles of single-track to one of the company's drill sites. Once we got there, we drove a further half-mile through the 3' tall native grass called Spinifex, a needle-sharp grass with seeds that can clog a radiator. It also has a nasty habit of collecting under vehicles and catching fire.

I was very fortunate to have come to the Tanami Desert when I did. Although the area has been in severe drought for nearly a decade, my visit was during one of the wettest years on record. Consequently, the Tanami was positively verdant, with many trees, mostly Casuarina, which range in size from a few feet to 30-feet. There was a huge assortment of native wild food (or "bush tucker") such as bush tomato, desert plums (which when dried, look like a raisin the size of a marble and have a sour/sweet taste), a seed which grows on a tree and is ground to make flour, native ginger, figs and much more. Plus the wildlife was simply amazing. There are herds of camels and kangaroos and packs of wild dingos. The bird life is just as stunning with flocks of brightly colored, squawking parrots often filling the trees. We used our Land Cruisers as pack mules and the cabs as a refuge from the ever-present flies that appear from nowhere the moment you step outside.

One evening while we were sitting around the campfire, I met Tommy, one of the Aboriginal elders whose land we were exploring. Tommy said a must-see area was Wedge Mountain, a sacred site that requires the permission of the Aboriginal owners to visit. Tommy assured me that I was welcome to visit Wedge Mountain and detailed how to get to a sacred spring called Balancing Rock, the head of a stream which only rarely flows. To get to Balancing Rock, you simply follow the streambed until you get to the water source...

The sun sets on the frozen, Red Centre of the Ngalia Basin while the venerable Land Cruiser waits for another day of hard yakka. Photo by Rico

Testing the diff locks in a sump hole after the drilling is complete—Australia is pretty flat. Photo by Rico

Positioning the intercooler on top of the D4-D keeps it out of harm's way but it has a habit of catching leaves and debris when off road. Photo by Josh Boltrek

Australia is strewn with interesting rock formations and Balancing Rock is no exception. Photo by Josh Boltrek

The spring at Balancing Rock is equally beautiful and mysterious. Photo by Josh Boltrek

Keeping a close eye on the bush fires is essential to survival. Photo by Josh Boltrek

Tommy's HJ60—with 234,000 miles on the clock—has not been on pavement since the mid-90's and runs on everything from veggie oil to jet fuel.
Photo by Josh Boltrek