Shitbox Rally| When a New Yorker Meets Outback Australia

“We are going 100 km per hour down the Gibb River Road in a 1994 (Holden) Commodore. Keep a note of that, because of a lot of people would think that is absolutely nuts,” Renee said.

I dutifully write down her words: 100 km/h. Gibb River Road. Absolutely nuts.

But Renee and I weren’t in it alone.  In it with us was the six other cars in our group and the 243 other cars participating in the Shitbox Rally.

The Shitbox Rally is a fundraiser that raises both money and awareness for cancer, and I came back to say one last good bye to Australia by conquering territory I never had before.

It was the night before the start of the rally and the very first time I was meeting Renee. “Can you drive?” She asked me. I thought, Oh god, she has no idea. I bluffed, “oh, yes, definitely!”

Renee seemed satisfied as she seem to think my trip wouldn’t be complete unless I had a go at the dirt roads that trailed through the middle of nowhere in Australia

Flash forward to where the bitumen (or asphalt) ends and the Gibb River Road begins. I see it for the first time in all the years I’ve been living in Australia: Red earth. Air caked with dust. The Outback.

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I am feel queasy, like I ate something I shouldn’t have eaten. I sit behind the wheel and my mouth is as dry as the land around me.

“It’s okay if the car rolls onto its side,” Renee tells me. “Don’t worry – that’s totally fine. It’s when the car completely rolls over that we’d have to be worried out.”

I laugh. She can’t be serious? But somehow I trust her. She seems almost too cool and too calm to be wrong. The faster we go, the safer we are, I’m told, which seems bizarre and insane and like it goes against all laws of nature, but like a  fighter going into the ring I accept the challenge ahead.

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We start driving, and my heart is running a marathon. I can’t see a thing. There’s plumes of dust that are like brick wall in front of me. The wheel is possessed; it’s going completely bizerk. The seatbelt keeps getting stuck and I’m locked into place. We have no radio for music to calm me down.

“Holy shit this insane,” I scream above the entire car, which is shaking as we drive over the unpaved roads. I am holding onto the wheel like I’m holding on for my life.

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“You’re doing great,” Renee’s voice is my mantra, my reassurance.

And then, somewhere sooner than I was even near used to the conditions, someone comes over the radio: A road train is coming.

I had no idea what a road train was, and in my head I’m imagining train tracks up ahead. Renee rolls up her window and tells me to do the same for mine.

I can see it ahead ploughing through the distance. “Fuck,” I start saying to Renee. “Fuck fuck what do I do.”

She tells me to stay steady and keep driving. Road trains, I learn, are tractor trailers with three trailers in tow behind them. As we draw nearer, our car gets completely lost in the dust. I start yelling. Renee tells me to stop. For a few minutes, the entire world is gone.

“Holy hell, Renee!” And I laugh. She laughs. We keep driving, and dusk starts falling.

My buddy group stops as the night gets thicker around us. We need to start watching out for critters, they say. The roos will be coming from every which way, and god forbid we hit a cow while going at such a high speed, we’d be dead.

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I remember back to past road trips I had been on when I first moved to Australia. I was so eager to see them, kept my eyes so peeled for them; to me the open road meant kangaroo time, though I quickly learned that dawn and dusk made it all the more dangerous. My heart would seize up in fear whenever the day started to fold in on us, whenever we’d longer too long to snap that picture perfect, gentle sunset we just couldn’t get enough of. For as badly as I wanted to see kangaroos, I also prayed that they wouldn’t jump out at us in the dark.

“Ali,” they say to me, “will you be driving? Yeah? Okay…if a roo jumps out at you, you need to keep driving. Don’t slow down, don’t swerve, don’t stop. Just keep going.”

And once again I am filled with a silent fear.

We drive on into the night, and we are swallowed whole by the darkness. The only things I can see are the occasional and faint glow of taillights in the distance, clouds of dust dancing along the roads.

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It happened before I could process it. I screamed, and I blacked out. I remember the first kangaroo vividly, having a deer in headlights look, this face of terror as if he were to be thinking, What the! They hopped their way right into my car. One loud thump, and then two more.

“Just keep driving,” the words are sprinting out of Renee’s mouth. “You’re fine. You’re fine. It’s fine. Keep going. It’s okay. You’re okay. We’re okay.”

“Oh my god. Holy fuck,” I am panicking. My hand covers my mouth, and I am in total shock. I’m laughing but the tears are blinding me. “We need to go back. We have to turn back.”

Renee tells me it wouldn’t be a good idea to turn back. We just need to keep going.

And we do. With all the mechanical breakdowns, batteries dying, cars overheating, people needing pee breaks (talk about being terrified – imagine going to the toilet in the Australian bush, teeming with snakes and spiders, in the black of night) and arrived at camp at around 11 PM that night. I drove nearly 500k’s that day, from 9 AM straight through til when we stopped. My eyes were falling out my head when we finally arrived at camp; in fact, I may have fallen asleep whilst pulling into our parking space.
Either way, though, I did it. The dust storms and shaky wheels and kangaroo mishaps, I did it. And I was really damn proud.
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