Wayne Kerr Does the Desert

[Wayne Kerr]

A few months back my old mate Johhny Longprong and I flew home to catch up with a some other chaps for a bit of a desert adventure. I reckon Johnny must be a zillionaire as he never seems to do any work, and when he isn’t bumming around on his mango farm up in Uthai Thani Province, he’s always off on some crazy trip.

Anyway over way too many beers up at his farm earlier in the year we cooked up a bit of a plan to do a 12,000 km outback odyssey around Australia. Johnny pretty much wanted to get away from his harem for a while, and I hadn’t been back for yonks, so it seemed like the perfect getaway from Asia. Here’s a rough sketch of our planned route.


^ The mud map we sketched out whilst on the piss

We knew we couldn’t do it ourselves and a few phone calls back home and we quickly had a bit of a team together for a month long piss-up in the desert. First up was Big Kev, an accomplished rally driver, adventurer, and beer drinker extraordinaire, old Roger the dodger as mechanic, Paul de Mills as video man, and bloody Wally the Whinger, our cook.

We were equipped with a Toyota Landcruiser with strengthened front end and canister shock absorbers and an aging Toyota troopcarrier as the packhorse. The Landcruiser was towing a Trak camper with our kitchen and water supply.


^ Our ride – nice little turbo diesel


^ The mechanic, video man, and cook drove the troop carrier


^ A taste of things to come