The Breakdown, P. Diddy and The Bush Turkey!

It is the first day on a road trip of a lifetime and we had set of in the evening, we drove through the night playing drinking games and creating ‘the list’ of utterly ridiculous tasks to complete on our journey:

1)      Everyone must be sick from a moving vehicle

2)      Pick up some hitchhikers

3)      Drink 100 boxes of wine

4)      Stage a kidnap

5)      Get a pet

6)      Create a bus song

7)      Put a hand in a kangaroos pouch

8)      Kill something

We had drove for a couple of hours north and made it to Lake Macquarie, were we settled by the shore for our first night’s sleep, if you could call it that; we had 11 people and 11 backpacks in a Toyota Hiace. Three in the front, Harry was on top of the bags (I think), Hanna and Jess in the first row, me in the gap between the seats, Adam on the next row, and three more in the back with 5 of us sharing one seat for a foot rest. This was truly the most cramped night’s sleep of my life, and then it starts, Kelly, Hanna, Ryan and Jere have got to be the most horrific snorers I have ever heard, it was constant. I sat on top of my backpack slowly rocking and crying waiting for the sun to rise.

When the sun finally rose I was grumpy as shit, and was then presented with a knob (processed chicken and ham flavoured tube of meat – that doesn’t contain any ham) and cheese sandwich, yummy. We got all of our stuff together and set off on our journey heading towards Port Macquarie. Around an hour into our trip the front of the bus makes a huge bang and the engine starts to cut out so we pull over, this seems relatively normal as we usually have to stop every 30-60 mins to let it cool down, but we couldn’t start the engine again. We made some signs on a towel, asking for a mechanic but no one would help us, we also tied someone to a tree, just for shits and giggles.

After an hour we admitted defeat, and thought that we were here for the day as it was a Sunday and no were was open, so we pushed our car into the nearest layby, this was our new home until that bus was fixed.

So this was it, we were stranded in the middle of nowhere, literally miles from civilisation in a layby. We had limited food, water and alcohol and it was beginning to look a bit bleak, so we formulated a rather silly plan of action. Jere and Harry would hitchhike to the nearest town for supplies, the girls would set up camp and Adam and Ryan would go for a drunken hunt in the forest to see what they could find. Jere and Harry left first, and then Adam and Ryan; dressed in stupid hats and armed with a pocket knife and a box of wine they headed out to the forest.  Me, Clare and Jess decided to collect some fire wood and ripped down a tree with our bare hands, which was more to pass the time than anything else.

After a couple of hours, Jere and Harry returned with some people who asked us to watch their budgie for them whilst they took the boys to town, which was apparently 12miles up the road. Task number 5 had been achieved; we had acquired a pet budgie named P. Diddy that we looked after in our bus for an hour or so, until they returned with no food or water but $60 worth of wine!

In that hour we had received a rather worrying text from the guys in the forest, Ryan wrote “we are lost, and I have been stabbed by Adam, but we are ok” he then turned off the phone! As the sun began to set we all began to worry about the guys in the woods, as it was a massive forest full of wild animals and they had promised to be back before now. I was especially worried, as I knew that Adam was terrified of being in a forest at night because of The Blair Witch Project, so a group of us headed into the woods after them. We walked for an hour screaming their names to no reply; they must have gone in deep. When it got dark the boys convinced us that we had to go back in case we got lost as well.

We were all panicking and discussing what to do next, should we call the rangers or wait till morning? Then we received another text “we are lost, but we have caught a bush turkey and have found a road we will be back soon” after the initial relief that they were ok we all thought “how the hell did they catch a freaking bush turkey”!!

 When they finally returned; they had apparently been picked up by some local Christian farmers who spoke to them about scripture and then took them to their farm, where they were having a party. They plucked, stuffed and half cooked the turkey, gave the boys a rotisserie and some booze patched up Ryan’s hand from were he had been stabbed and dropped them back at camp. I can honestly say that this day was genuinely the most bazar day of my life so far, and it was also the first time I realised that Oz is very different to the UK – in the UK this would not happen.