Lonely Planet The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology: True stories from the world's best writers

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LONG DISTANCE

BY TORRE DEROCHE

(Names have been changed.)

It’s a well-known fact that teenagers can’t see long distance. They can only see as far as the back corner of a sports oval, where the cool kids are smoking cigarettes and making out with mouths bracketed by zits. Beyond that point, the world obscures into vague, peripheral irrelevance. Whateverland. It therefore seemed odd that my high school would arrange for a busload of fifteen-year-olds to travel to the very centre of irrelevance, a mindboggling 2380 kilometres from our normal seeing range and into the blank void of the Australian outback.

What do you pack for a journey into barren nothingness? Well, in my case, everything I could stuff into a duffle bag only marginally smaller than a Mini Cooper, including most of my wardrobe, a pair of black Dr Marten boots for hiking, John Lennon sunglasses, a disposable camera, a Walkman and mixtapes, a journal with a lock and key, my favourite stuffed toy, my favourite padded bra, zit cream and a huge feather comforter patterned with lions and tigers (to keep the monsters out at night).

We were headed towards the country’s red centre, to the world’s largest monolith, Uluru, but of course we didn’t care about enormous rocks or monumental deserts or the fact that, in the outback, you can see a zillion burning suns on the ceiling of night, a shooting star a second. We cared only about the fact that, for three delicious weeks, our days would be spent pressed up against forty other teens in the small and breathy space of a moving vehicle – without parental supervision.

We knew we’d left the suburbs when we saw a truck fly past with a bloodied kangaroo tangled in its bumper, little paws angled in haphazard directions, guts woven through the steel grill like a macabre cross-stitch. ‘Ewwww!’ everyone on the bus chorused in disgusted delight. The outback roadside was littered with a hodgepodge of dead wildlife, each with its own halo of blowflies. You don’t often see death in the suburbs, and seeing so many lifeless mammals was like witnessing something illicit. But what was going on outside the windows was not nearly as exciting as what was going on inside the bus….

In the seat next to mine, there was Marike: an exceptional artist, the coolest girl in school, and as stylish as she was self-assured. I was in love with her, platonically speaking, though I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be friends with her so much as drape myself in her like a wolf-skin coat so I could navigate the world inside that much chutzpah. She had a mean streak in her too, but we were best friends, so I was never the target of her bite. I was safe next to this big, bad, beautiful wolf – protected, even.

Then there was Kurt. He was new to our school and darkly mysterious, like Christian Slater in Heathers, and so, of course, when he spoke to me, each and every hair on my body stood to attention. When he accidentally brushed past me one time, electric currents ran through my bones. Strategising ways to sit closer to him consumed most of my mental energies.

There was Carolina, who’d been my friend since we were wide-eyed and clear-skinned. She taught me how to shoplift and carve a bong from an apple at a time when I was still memorising all the lyrics to Disney songs. She was way cooler than me, luminous and magnetic, quirky and pixie-like, which is why Kurt couldn’t take his eyes off her.

There was Lars, with his shock of white-blonde hair, tanned skin, chiselled cheeks, and blue eyes that gazed with the kind of disquieting intensity that makes jelly out of knees. He had a knack for making me laugh by poking me in the ribs and saying ‘Boop!’ He loved me; I knew it. The only trouble was: Lars loved every girl on the bus. My Plan B love interest was a grade A player.

And then there was me: twig-skinny, giraffe-tall, naively trusting, and offbeat by accident. While all the girls had turned into hourglasses, pears, apple bottoms, and other soft, exquisite shapes of femininity, I was still angled and pointy. Any day, I expected my curves to pop too. It was like waiting for Christmas to come.

Three weeks. I was to have three glorious weeks with these people, during which time anything at all could happen. The bus passed another mangled roo on the roadside, his body a crimson smear on black tarmac wobbling with heat. ‘Ewwwwww!’ we chimed.

This was looking like it was going to be the best time of my life.

Seventy percent of the Australian mainland is classified as semi-arid, arid, or desert, and so you’d think I would’ve known what most of my country looked like. I didn’t. The sight of the desert surprised me. I’d always pictured Sahara-like rolling dunes of golden, shifting sand, but this was all red dirt and spiky spinifex from horizon to horizon, for days and days. The flatness was astounding. I’d never seen so far into the distance before.

Sometimes we slept on the bus while it sped northwest in a dead straight line. Sometimes we stopped and camped in the desert. The nights dipped to freezing and the mornings were fresh for a few hours before the heat of the day arrived. One morning, we emerged from our tents groggy and puffy-faced to find our teachers gathered around looking stressed and angry. They called a meeting. We gathered in a semi-circle, all forty of us.

One of the teachers held up a square foil packet, torn at its perforation. My first thought was that it was some kind of snack that I’d never seen before. Ooh, is that chocolate? I wondered. Chocolate for breakfast!

‘Whose condom packet is this?’ the teacher said.

A condom? People my age were having sex?

Nobody said a word.

The dirt at our feet became very interesting to us all, and it was then that I noticed Dr Marten boots paired with my twiggy legs made me look like a newborn giraffe who had joined the military. Idiot.

‘Well?’ the teachers prompted.

More silence.

In the beats of that silence, I grew overwhelmingly sad. My idea of fun at fifteen was watching Warner Bros. cartoons on Saturday mornings with my little sister sleepy-eyed beside me, my mum in the kitchen cooking waffles. I worried that sex might change this, that I would outgrow my little sister. I worried that it would end the waffles. But more than anything, I worried that everyone else was speeding along a fast, straight road towards adulthood while I was still a twig with a washboard chest and Disney songs resounding joyously in my head.

‘Is anyone going to own up to this?’ the teacher prompted.

No doubt our eyes became impossibly wide and glassy as we shape-shifted into the most puppyish version of ourselves – a superpower that only teens have – until the teachers hesitated, unsure of how to proceed. They gathered heads and whispered among themselves, likely discussing whether it was more important to punish teenagers for hooking up on a school camp or to celebrate the fact they did so safely.

The issue was dropped.

I still hoped there’d somehow be chocolate.

Uluru first came into sight in the Pitjantjatjara tribal lands, looking like a pimple that had budged from the horizon. As we neared, we dug deep into our juvenile vocabularies to describe what we were seeing, exchanging such riveting dialogue as:

‘Oh, wow, it really is big.’

‘Yes, it’s massive.’

‘Way more massive than I thought.’

‘Oh my god, you guys, it’s soooo big!’

We quickly ran out of adjectives and grew listless. We’d travelled such a long way to get here and our excitement turned to impatience, impatience to indifference, so that when we finally got off the bus at the rock we were complaining of hunger and tiredness, and the relentless nuisance of flies.

The Australian flag will tell you that the British own the country, while history and due respect indicate that it belongs to the indigenous people. Actually, it’s flies that own the continent. They’re ruthless dictators who help themselves to the corners of your eyes, drinking from tear ducts and gathering in great armies to loop-the-loop around your face in infuriating black clouds that can’t be shooed away by even the most enthusiastic jazz hands. There is no swear word in the English language that can adequately express the frustration felt as a result of non-stop fly harassment. Perhaps the Aboriginals have one, I don’t know. Either way, the flies could’ve been the reason we all began unravelling, or maybe it was the heat and the storms, the broken sleeps, or the fact that we were a fizzing, noxious hormone cocktail – on wheels.

We pitched our tents for the night in the campground closest to the rock. A torrential rain began without warning, and leaked into the tent canvas to form a waterfall over my bed. Marike dashed into the tent to move her stuff out of the way, and, anxious, I yelled, ‘Move my blankets! Move my blankets!’

She glared at me with her green wolf eyes and said, ‘Grow up, bitch!’ I wasn’t immune from Marike’s bite after all, wasn’t protected alongside this big, bad, beautiful wolf.

Outside the tent, I cried until I coughed and choked. Behind me, a rock nine kilometres in circumference shone brilliant copper against the silver of passing rainclouds, but who cares about staggeringly beautiful geological anomalies when life is rushing forward at breakneck speed and you’re being left behind.

My favourite teacher, Miss Michaels, asked me if I wanted to go for a walk with her to talk it over, and we left the campsite to follow train tracks into the colourless and disturbing emptiness of the desert, as lonely as Mars. The tracks were covered in dry bones in both directions – femurs and ribs, jaws and teeth, and I wondered how so many bones had ended up in one place. The only logical reason for this, I decided, is that once upon a time, an unfortunate animal was sitting on the tracks when a train came along and squashed it. The meat of that dead thing attracted a hungry dingo, who then got killed by a train, who then attracted another dingo, who then got killed by a train… until it became a museum of fatal mishaps. This seemed slapstick hilarious, like a Warner Bros cartoon, but I was too involved with choking on tears to switch out to a giggle.

Miss Michaels listened while I ranted and wept. Her motherly attention opened my floodgates, and from my skinny body poured the great burden of being a 15-year-old girl, only without either the perspective or eloquence that comes with time and maturity. ‘Like, she’s being mean to me for no reason, and, like, she can be such a bitch sometimes and…’ Flies gathered on my teary face for a drink. I shooed them with two hands. Fuck you, flies. Fuck you, Marike.

Miss Michaels pulled a white carton of cigarettes out of her handbag. ‘Want one?’ she said.

My jaw dropped like a train-struck dingo. I didn’t know how to respond. I wasn’t a smoker – she’d mistaken me for one of the cool kids, but I considered taking it up on the spot so as not to leave her hanging.

‘Um… thank you,’ I said, ‘but… I don’t… actually… smoke.’

She shrugged and lit the cigarette for herself, her cheeks caving into her jaw as she sucked hard on the filter. I noticed her face was pockmarked and weathered, ravaged by both puberty and time, her hair frizzy and dry. She was so old. 30? 35? Fuck you, Miss Michaels.

We continued to walk along the tracks, crunching dry dust, bones and tussock grass beneath our feet, our earlier ease now strained. Maybe I should’ve taken the cigarette. I bet Marike would’ve taken the cigarette. Carolina would’ve taken two cigarettes – one for her lips, one to stick behind her ear – and then she would’ve taught Miss Michaels how to make a bong from a dead dingo’s skull.

On the tracks I spotted a dingo’s jawbone with two clean rows of intact teeth and not a flay of skin or tuft of fur remaining. I picked it up to take home as a souvenir. The trip would be coming to an end soon. This was looking like it was going to be the worst time of my life.

While the morning was still fresh from the previous night’s freeze, we set out to climb King’s Canyon, a rocky interruption to the desert plain. I broke away from the group on ‘Heartbreak Hill’ and dashed ahead, traversing cliffs and waterholes, gorges and sandstone domes. ‘It’s not a race!’ cried a teacher from behind me, but I kept racing, because I craved