Several years ago, and this story is true, I was riding "shot gun"
with
a friend on a Road Train.
(For our foreign readers - a Road Train is a Prime Mover with up to 5
Trailers and they are regularly used for transporting goods and
livestock in outback Australia). We were moving cattle from a cattle
station near the Alice up to Katherine and onto Darwin.
Nothing special until we were flagged down by a couple of indigenous
Australians who had run out of petrol about 250 just outside of
Katherine. We pulled up and went back to see what the problem was and
they pleaded up to tow them into town (Katherine).
We laughed and said that they were crazy to want our truck to tow an
old
rust bucket of a Ford 250 KM on a dirt road. Anyway, they managed to
convince Pete and they produced a large chain and Pete said that the
chain would rip the front off the car, because a chain has no give in
it
and so Pete came up with a tow rope that they could use.
They eagerly pushed the car the hundred yards down the road to the
last
trailer of the road train and hooked up with gusto jumped in their car
and popped the top off a couple of coldies they'd had in the backseat
and sat back and looked at us as if to say, "We're ready..."
So Pete and I went back to the prime mover and went on our way.
Now if you have ever seen a Road Train coming towards you on the road
it
looks like a truck with a 200 metre wide dust cloud coming straight
for
you and if you're on a dirt road the best thing to do is to pull well
off to the side of the road and park the car turn off the engine and
wind up the windows and wait for the dust to settle after it has
passed.
Well...back to our story.
About 150 KM down the road Pete thought he'd better check because
hauling a car behind a road train was against his better judgment. So
we pulled up and went down to the two guys and this is what we found:
The car was filled to the windows with dust. One guy was hiding under
a
blanket in the driver's seat with his foot flat to the floor on the
burnt out brakes and the other guy had kicked the windscreen out and
with a broken bottle, was lying across the hood of the car trying to
cut
the tow rope. Both looked like red mudmen and it is possibly the
funniest thing I've ever seen in the Territory to date.
