Nice day for a dusty wedding on the Shitbox Rally
THE other drivers in the Shitbox Rally are even weirder than me, says motoring columnist John Connolly.
THE Weekend Australian entry in the Shitbox Rally has raised more than $13,000 for cancer research, and the rally itself has raised $1.4 million.
Here, co-driver John Connolly, a motoring columnist for The Weekend Australian, keeps you up to date with the eccentric convoy as it approaches the West Australian desert.
Follow Connolly on Twitter: @ConnollyShitbox
Evening, day three, Marble Bar.
THE convoy spent yesterday in the Marble Bar caravan park recovering from the dirt road drive from Meeketharra, which was like driving through a London pea-soup fog. The car in front would simply disappear into the dust and reappear just as you were about to rear-end it. The dust seeps into everything in and on the car.
I feel for Byron Bay’s Wallace and Grommit team of Ben and Dan Wallace who are aiming to drive their $350 SAAB convertible with the top down from Perth to Darwin.
Last night was the first ever shitbox wedding. A couple who met on last year’s rally, got engaged, married and re-enacted the big night at The Ironclad Hotel complete with monks and 150 shitboxers. My co-driver, Sydney banker Simon Ford, got roped in to be one of the best men. Who said romance was dead?
About 30 per cent of the field are women. But the stars are a team called “Two Girls. One Is Mad.” Vanessa Heaney and Kasia Wallis are young. To increase the degree of difficulty they are driving a 1988 Mazda 121 which is small Japanese car designed to take elderly Japanese persons safely around the streets of Kyoto. Vanessa and Kasia have obviously played too much World Rally Cup on their PlayStation. Dust, cattle, road trains and pyscho drivers haven’t fazed them at all. And worst of all they look better at the end of each day. The rest of us look like the stars of Wolf Creek 2.
Evening, day one, Saturday, May 31
SO far I have tried to blind my co-driver Simon Ford only once. It was a swipe across the left eye with the business section of The Australian. He said it was because I was trying to stop him driving. Well, that’s partly true because I really didn’t want to die on the first day.
We are in Team 16, which has Ben and Dan Wallace from Byron Bay in a shabby-chic $350 SAAB convertible and two teams from Bangalow NSW with women dressed as bees. The other members of Team 16 are weirder.
The Caltex Roadhouse at Wubin, 300km up the highway from Perth, is normally a quiet bacon-and-egg-roll and meat-pie sort of place. But at about 10am on Saturday, 100 people dressed as zombies, convicts, ballroom dancers and Hawaiian surfers dropped by for a few skinny lattes and soy caps. Two minutes later the coffee machine broke down and it was instant from the urn with one sugar or nothing, and they ran out of snags.
We embarked on this rally expecting desert from the start, but so far the scenery and villages along the way have been amazing, as have the dead animals and some of the live ones.
Since we are driving through the 4 per cent of Australia Telstra doesn’t cover, we communicate by radio. I have started a daily CB radio program called on the road with Trucker John and it’s already a ratings failure.
We were meant to pull into Meekatharra, 400km up the road from Wubin at 4.45pm but we arrived at 8pm because the people in our team all wanted toilet stops at different times. Meeka Rotary put on a big night for us at the showground. There are country music, snags and porta loos … man, it doesn’t get any better than this. Of course nobody told us that at night the temperature drops to -50C, that Meekatharra (meaning “little water) gets lots of snow, and that Simon snores for Australia.
Morning, day one, Saturday, May 31
THROUGH the early-morning darkness, an international team of 500 drivers, support crew and weird watchers turned up at Kings Park to prepare for the 3500km Shitbox Rally to Darwin. The back way.
There were a lot of Arabs, Teletubbies, honey bees, some zombies and a British sausage.
Despite the hardships ahead, the mood was lighthearted if not manic. Fellini couldn’t have created the scene. Convicts mixed with fairies, a lot of bears and even more middling aged persons in Hawaiian shirts.
At last night’s briefing, organiser James Freeman had warned the competitors of crocodiles, sunstroke, snakes, spiders and overuse of alcohol.
Were we concerned? No, because we had drunk too many of the $10 Peronis. This morning was a different matter. As the sun came out, Freeman called us up for the final briefing. His only message was to stay safe. What does he know?
While some of us have done the minimum decor on our cars, the Two Studs have half a woman on theirs with appropriate lights. A Middle Eastern Merc has half a camel, a Datsun with the front teeth of a shark and a Nissan with hundreds of half and full Shreks.
And the cars. A six-wheel Ford Escort, a Porsche and even more vehicles that haven’t been seen on Australian roads for 20 years. Still when your transport can’t cost more than $1000 (including rego) what do you expect?
Getting a couple of hundred cars out of a park onto the byways of Perth was never going to be easy. But after a few hours it happened and we’re on the way.
The Shitbox Rally raises money for cancer research. Donate here.
jc@jcp.com.au
Follow John’s adventure on Twitter: @ConnollyShitbox