Brisbane, Australia: Racing the desert sun

OUTBACK | Father and son reunite for coast to coast journey across Australia's red center

BRISBANE, Australia -- It was about this time last year when my father's offhanded comment during a phone call really got me thinking.

"You know," he said, "April-May is the perfect time to do this trip."

He was talking about the same trip we'd discussed many times before -- a desert highway journey across Australia's red center, traveling west from the East Coast city of Brisbane. Distance wise, it would be like driving from New York to San Francisco. But Australia is the most arid continent in the world, and the sometimes harsh, isolated conditions we'd encounter would be quite different.

As an Australian national living in the United States for the past three years, I saw this as the perfect opportunity to spend quality time with the ol' man and to experience part of my own country that I knew very little about. Like 70 percent of Australia's 20 million residents, I'd grown up in an urban area on the East Coast. The vast interior remained a mystery to me.

If I still lived in Australia I might have scoffed at the trip like I'd done in the past. But time and distance from my homeland -- coupled with countless inquiries from Americans about whether I'd traveled "the Outback" -- finally pushed me into action.

The plan was to travel along some of the country's most challenging and isolated desert roads until we reached the other side and ended up in Broome, an old pearl-farming town in northern West Australia.

The obvious place to start this story is at the end of the black road, where the tar finally succumbs to the red sandy desert. For us, this point is in a town called Boulia in the state of Queensland, about the same latitude as the southern tip of the world-famous Great Barrier Reef that runs along Australia's northeast coast.

From Brisbane, we'd driven for days along country roads to get here, passing though towns that got progressively smaller, until a pub and a police station were the only evidence of civilization. Emus patrolled the streets of this gateway to the desert with a swagger that said they're at the top of the food chain; humans are second.

We headed to the local hotel -- the Australian equivalent of a roadside bar -- to glean information from the locals on the condition of the Plenty Highway, a 560-mile dusty track considered to be a shortcut to Alice Springs and the country's red center.

"The track is pretty good at the moment, well, as pretty good as you can expect of the Plenty," said a large man at the other end of the bar. A wry smile to the bartender suggested this kind of cryptic statement is part of a sport played by the residents to bamboozle the slow trickle of travelers passing through. We left the conversation at that and decided a certain amount of fear is a healthy burden to carry onto a long stretch of desert highway.

The Australian desert is not something to be taken lightly. People have been known to come out here and get lost in the eerie sameness, never to be seen again. We were well prepared for our journey, with a high-wheel-clearance Toyota Land Cruiser, a high frequency radio, a satellite emergency beacon, a half dozen frozen steaks in a fridge connected to an auxiliary battery, enough reserve water to last a week, and Australian bush bread wrapped in a tea towel on the dashboard to be snacked on along the way.

Many of the major highways in Australia's interior remain unpaved, but they're a legitimate option for traversing the country. They bisect a landscape that changes subtly every second of the drive. Red ant hills begin to protrude from the ground like blisters ready to pop under the sun's gaze. The earth bleeds to the surface, contrasting starkly against the bodies of ghostly white gum trees.

The realization that we were truly in the Outback settled in during our first night of "bush camping" along the Plenty Highway. With kangaroos bouncing around in the cool twilight, we picked an arbitrary clearing among the skin-colored shrubs and twisted tree skeletons to spend the night. Out here, it's not hard to convince yourself that you're the only person in the world because usually it's true -- at least for 100 miles or so.

The next day we took a slight detour off Plenty Highway to visit Birdsville. It's home to a famous horse race each September, when the population of the small town swells from 100 to 6,000 for the two-day event.

The famous Birdsville pub today has lost most of its charm, resembling more of a museum for tourists who fly in for a two-minute Outback experience. It's well worth venturing just 22 miles out of town to a sand dune called Big Red -- an ideal spot to watch the sunset.

Driving along the Plenty, you climb over sand hills like Big Red every few miles, making the journey feel like a roller coaster ride at times.

A layer of red dust covered us when we pulled into Alice Springs, where tourists come to visit the famed Uluru (Ayers Rock), the big red rock that has become the iconic image of the Australian Outback.

Being my first time out here, we couldn't leave without checking it out.

"The Rock" is truly a marvel, but it was overrun with reams of people setting off to climb the ridge of the great monument -- despite the wishes of the Aboriginies who'd rather you not climb on top of their once sacred place.

There are plenty of opportunities in Alice Springs to buy Aboriginal works of art, from the women displaying their canvasses in the parks to the modern galleries in the Todd Mall, where a well-known name will fetch a princely sum by any contemporary art collector's standards.

From Alice Springs, the only thing separating us and our West Coast destination was the Tanami Desert. To traverse it, we'd take the Tanami Track, one of the most remote roads in the country, if not the world.

Cars on the Tanami resemble post-apocalyptic robots. Covered in red dust with protruding antennas, they creep along the road like mechanical bugs, pausing at the occasional road stop to hydrate on increasingly expensive diesel fuel. The price has shot up to an unprecedented $3 a liter, or roughly $12 a gallon.

The Rabbit Flat Roadhouse, a fuel stop at least 100 miles from anywhere in any direction along the Tanami Track, is the most remote roadhouse in the country. Even if you don't need gas, it's worth stopping here for a beer and a microwave-heated pie from the couple with French accents. They moved to Australia 30 years ago, finding this place while on a trip similar to ours.

As my father and I continued to follow the fuzzy horizon and drive west into the sun, I finished the last morsel of the bush bread. My mind began to wander, tripping on earthy images as the faint scent of bush fires reached the edge of my nostrils. Rare Australian black cockatoos squawked overhead, a sound as distinctively Australian as the taste of Vegemite on dry biscuits or the smell of boiling Billy tea.

The sound also signaled something else: We were near water. The Tanami Track has led us to the edge of the Western Kimberly region of Western Australia, where the wet landscape is punctuated by waterfalls and flowing rivers.

It's a day's drive along a paved road to our destination, the coastal town of Broome. I relish the last moments of our desert experience by watching our red veil of dust settle behind us in the rearview mirror.

I think about how rare it is to find such desolate isolation in today's populating world, and how lucky I am to share it with my dad.

When we arrive on the coast, we end our long journey by diving into the tropical turquoise waters.

Matthew Smith is a New York-based free-lance writer.