Kombi Not Quite Crusin' But On The Road

Okay, so where was I... Oh, yes, that's right - stranded in the middle of nowhere, waiting for our kombi Jefro to be fixed. So Luke and I drove around to meet our new best mate, the Tennant Creek mechanic called Les, at his state of the art workshop. Yesterday we agreed that 8am would be a great time, so we could hopefully get the kombi back and be on our way by no later than 10 or 11am. Well things happen a little differently in Tennant Creek, like much of the Northern Territory, and when Les finally rocked up at 8:50am, he didn't mention us eagerly waiting at the gate like kids waiting for a lolly shop to open, but instead, chucked Luke the gate keys and said he had to quickly help out a mate with a truck. Bloody hell.


Our mechanic finally reappeared an hour and a bit later (and by this time, Luke and I had been joined by Brian the tow truck driver, Les' wife and two young kids who were running around with no shoes on and some random 'swagman' (his words) who drifted into town and had been hanging out at Les' workshop for the past two weeks) and was now ready to finish our van. Luke played 'goffer' to Les - i.e Go find me a screw driver, go find me some degreaser, go find me a bucket load of concentration and a couple of litres of determination so I can finish this blasted kombi!!! I could see Luke was getting more and more frustrated, not because Les wasn't a good mechanic, but because this guy had so much stuff EVERYWHERE that it took him half an hour every time he needed a different tool. He actually kept his tools in an old weather beaten wheel barrow. That's right.

Ah well, finally the motor was back in the car and we were on our way (minus $850 ($500 for the gear box and $350 for labour) which we thought wasn't too bad considering a mechanic could charge pretty much what they wanted in Tennant Creek as there aren't a lot of options if you say no). Finally! Yippee! Whoo hoo! Party time!! I was so excited to get our car back and get out of this town that I almost did a small victory dance on the side of the road while Luke was getting petrol. But I'm kinda glad I restrained myself because our car troubles were not quite over.

The Barkely Highway runs from Tennant Creek across the Queensland border to Mount Isa and is a really desolate road. In the 560 odd kilometres between the towns, there is literally one roadhouse/ petrol station and one small village called Camooweal (pop: 400), 13km east of the QLD border. Because we didn't get the kombi back from the mechanic until 1pm, we wanted to drive as far as we could away from Tennant Creek that afternoon because - 1. We were understandable quite eager to leave this part of our trip WAY behind us and 2. If we were to (heaven help us!) break down again on the N.T side of the border, guess where the NRMA has to tow you? Yep, straight back to good ol' Tennant Creek.

But as we were making our escape, the battery indicator light came on and the further we drove, the brighter this bad boy light glowed. Nooo!!! Luke wasn't too concerned at first, as he thought it was just the fridge draining the battery (because we'd had no power to the van for a few days whilst it was being fixed), but when we pulled up on dark at Camooweal, we thought we'd be pushing our luck to drive another 2 hours in the dark to Mount Isa. So with no food in the fridge and our cupboards almost empty, it was a true campers dinner of tinned spaghetti on toast for us!

The next morning, we were up early and hit the road to Mount Isa. We'd made it! But then, after we'd shopped up a storm, we had a flat battery. Now I'd just been reading along the way that Mount Isa was the rodeo capital of Australia and who should come to our rescue? Two cowboy hat wearing, RM Williams totting country boys who gave us a jump start from their humongous ute, complete with piggin' spotlights and a set of bull horns. Classic.

But even these boys couldn't bring poor Jefro the kombi back to life for long... And this is when I realised that there were a few sides to Luke that I had been seeing quite a lot of lately.

This one...



And this one...



And this one...




Finally he found that the main alternator cable hadn't been re-connected to the battery. Was this Les the Tennant Creek mechanic's way of letting us know how annoying we were by putting the pressure on him to finish our van? Well, haha. You got us. (But I think we'll be the ones laughing when we get home to lush green NSW and realise we don't ever have to go back to Tennant Creek again!)

A quick call to the RACQ to make sure all our batteries were now charging and unfortunately our main battery still wasn't. This meant we had to get to the closest caravan park as soon as possible to manually charge the battery which will get us to Townsville so we can find an auto electrician who can recondition our alternator because it had burnt itself out after being unplugged for so long. The dramas!


In short, I had a moment of weakness where I actually thought we may have avoided some stress and a few sleepless nights by trading our kombi in for a brand new 4 x 4... but then I came to my senses. Where's the fun in that? Luke, on the other hand has treated the last week as a kind of express course in VW mechanics and is stoked at his new found kombi knowledge! Ah jeez. We're both just happy to be back on the road.


Yours in the great outdoors,

Odette