Around about 8 or 9 months ago, I was out on the town with some uni friends. Bear with me while I go off on a tangent to make an observation.

At uni pretty much all the guys i knew had basically two hobbies, drinking and chasing tail, and they both go with the uni lifestyle. Which is a fairly fixed routine. You wake up 2 hours late for the 9 am lecture for Immunology, at a mates house, on his futon. You dust yourself off, (maybe go home) shower etc and make your way into uni. You're getting a bit hungry so you make your way to refec to grab a chicken burger or whatever. You hear music from the campus club upstairs and decide, "Why not, I'll make a quick sweep for mates at the pub". The guy at the door waves you through knowingly while he stops everyone else for an ID check.

Next thing you know its 5pm, you're well toasted, and its your turn to buy the next jug with the silver coins that everyone has dug through their wallets to find. You decide its probably best you don't go to the MAB121 Tute you have that afternoon and instead invest that time more wisely in a game of pool. At some point the bar closes (or you're asked to leave) and the study group moves onto another pub. Drunken blur. Next thing you know its AM and the hour matches the sum total in your bank account. You're at the end of the bar in the Port Office with your tongue down the throat of some girl whose name you either didn't ask or did but forgot immediately. A mate taps you on the shoulder, and gives you a bourbon you either didn't ask for, or did but forgot about immediately. Your recollection beyond this point stops as abruptly and as disappointingly as a Sopranos finale and you find yourself on an unfamiliar couch the next morning wishing you could regurgitate your knowledge of cytokine-based signaling pathways with the ease that you're about to a late night Quarter Pounder.

Anyway, back to my point. Uni-life is a government subsidised party where your final grades are the reciprocal of how much fun you had. There is not a whole lot of time for hobbies. And there is even less money for expensive ones.

And then you graduate.

The real world puts an end to it all but pays you handsomely to not start drinking at 11am. The cash that you aren't drinking and is found in bundles of thousands rather than tens needs to find a use, this invariably ends in, for lack of a better word, a hobby. This is something like a stupid car or an overseas trip or whatever. Whatever you choose tends to be come the thing that defines you unlike back in the uni days when you just whatever everyone else did (ie. drink).

Now I went and bought a car. The Skyline. Threw plenty of cash at it and it kept me busy. My mate Luke went another extreme, he bought a Mitsubishi Challenger and threw plenty of cash at it. Of course they are completely different cars, one can't climb a driveway but can turn a corner and the other can climb rocks but can't turn corners. In principle they are the same though, most of the parts are bolt-ons, they just come from different companies, Tein instead of ARB. At the end of the day they are a pointless waste of cash, but they do nicely until you find yourself in a marriage and have to sell them and instead throw your cash at your own spawn.

So back to paragraph one. Said mates are out on the town, its probably someones birthday (there needs to be an occasion these days). Luke asks what people are doing for New Years, which is in my opinion the most stupid day of the year. Its this over-hyped event which I just don't care about. The fact that you have to learn to write an 08 instead of 07 is not something I feel the need to celebrate (but do anyway). Anyway, Luke as I said is a 4wd kinda guy, he suggests a trip to Moreton Island where his expensive toy becomes worthwhile. To me spending time in a tent on some remote island sounded more like something you'd do if you were seeking political asylum. Not something I'd do by choice. As the night drew on, a whiff of that uni life recklessness wafted into the area. The ideas started to flow like the bourbons. The stupid sounded awesome.

In the end my other mate Greg and I decided we would buy a cheap 4wd and show up Luke by showing him what a waste of time and money his shiny Challenger is. Going halves in a $700 car, what could go wrong. Surprisingly, the drunken idea carried over to the next day, and the next week. I bought a 1984 Pajero from ebay, and we spent 2 months getting the thing to work and be roadworthy.

The trip actually happened, and was hilarious. The whole thing was a bit of an adventure. The weather was shit and the island itself was pretty boring. However, it was all this that made it fun. On the second last day, down to like 1/4 of a tank (all three of us) and burning something like 40L/100km on the beach (which was impassable at points due to the king tides and beach erosion thanks to the cyclone up north), we attempted a mad dash at low tide (~9am) to the bottom of the island with all 3 cars to one of 2 fuel stations on the island. Just getting there was a mission, we nearly lost the pajero to the ocean and had to spend a good 45 minutes digging it out on an incoming tide. We ended up having to drive the rest of the way on the upper sand dunes (which is illegal, whatever), simply because there was no beach. It took us about 3.5 hours just to drive the 20 or so kilometres from our camp to the township. When we got there, the nice lady at the store informed us they stopped selling fuel 12 months ago.

So we had burnt loads of fuel just to get there (and we all had about the same fuel load by this stage), and the only extra fuel we had was 20litres of pre-mixed 2-stroke fuel back at camp (which had been contaminated with sea-water when we nearly lost the boat the day before). We bought lunch and decided to make a run to the other fuel station at the top end of the island. Low tide was long gone but we were taking the protected side beach. So away we went driving as quickly as you can when you look at the fuel guage as often as you do the direction you are going. We ended up hitting an impassable section and with the tide still on its way in we had no choice but to stop and drink beers.

We waited a few hours for the tide to turn. It was now about 4pm (high tide was 3pm), a quick call to the servo and we found out they closed at 5:30pm. If we waited till the tide was low enough to drive it would be probably 6 or 7pm. We also didn't have enough fuel to make it back to camp and to the servo in the morning, plus we had a early barge ride back to Brisbane the next day. Waiting around was getting a bit frustrating and never wanting nature to get the better of us, me and Greg grabbed an axe and a saw and started hacking at fallen trees (its a national park, whatever). After about half an hour we managed to clear the point enough for us to pass with a little ocean dip and started making another mad dash to the far tip of the island. The idea being that we would get a full tank and siphon out enough for the others to make it back to the barge the next day, as the others weren't prepared to do what we were to get there.

We drove through knee deep Moreton Bay at speed, over logs and through dead trees, losing the primary alternator, the drivers side indicator lens and the antenna in the process. After a couple of near misses with big washouts, we came to a screaming halt when a submerged log we couldn't drive over or around, or chop up blocked the path. So we just got stuck into the beers and gave up on getting fuel. It was something like 15 minutes till the place closed anyway, and the sort of driving we would have had to do would to cover the distance in time would have a bit too extreme. There were also, as we found out later, several even more impassable places up ahead as the seas on the protected side of the island had been big enough to wash away most of the beach. Eventually the others found a pair and caught up to where we had stopped. All along the beach were abandoned cars. People had given up trying to get back to their camp, parked their cars and walked. Presumably to return to them on low tide. The benefits of an in car beer fridge. The tide eventually went out enough for us to pass by which time it was well and truly dark. In all this we had left one of the girls behind saying we were going to be a "couple of hours", and our camp was out of mobile range so we couldn't call and explain it. We had presumed she'd be all worried about us and shit, apparently she enjoyed the quiet and hadn't really noticed as she was reading a good book. Bitch.

We did eventually get back to camp at about 8:30. Driving the whole way in 2WD to save fuel, which makes the inland tracks rather tail happy but its not as much fun when nobody is standing there with a camera and your car is roll-over hazard at the best of times. In the morning one of the other guys made a run on the smell of an oil rag to the servo and picked up fuel for the rest of us to make it back to the barge.

In all it was fun. An adventure, just to get fuel. Except we didn't. And we broke probably a half dozen laws in the process too.



On the Queens Birthday weekend, we did another island mission. This time to Fraser Island. It was organised by a guy who was convinced that the island was full of European backpackers (he used the term barra) just dying to meet an average looking Aussie who can barely play a guitar. The guy was certainly confident, and I'm no player hater but it was amusing to watch none the less. His probably most successful attempt was on a couple of canadian girls who he had spent 30 minutes talking up the pajero to. They later wandered over to see what all the fuss was about. On hearing that it had a large bar fridge full of beer, an in car PC, reversing cameras flip down LCD visors and so on, I'm presuming they expected to see something like a pimped out 300C raised on dirty big mud tyres with more flashy electronic gear than a Daft Punk concert. The look on their face when they eventually saw it was priceless. Like they had seen a dingo for the first time and realised it was just a dog with ginger hair. "Oh..."

Other than that the trip was pretty boring. The pajero didn't break down once, it didn't even get bogged and nobody caught any barra. The most eventful thing to happen was me forgetting the tent and having to sleep under basically a pergola/shade cloth which when it did provide some protection from the rain would rip out its pegs and launch across the campsite. Yet it was still more comfortable than sleeping in the pajero.

So anyway, I've decided a working car isn't much fun. Nor would a camping trip with perfect weather be fun.

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