Today was to be a full day of driving in our Hippie Camper van if we were ever going to make it to Uluru (Ayers rock). but were we going to get there as it seems our Hippie camper van wanted an impromptu start in broken hill.

So after Martin had driven for a few hundred km, I took over and as we pulled over on the highway I took off quick although the car had different ideas and didn’t feel right.  After checking I hadn’t left the handbrake on or anything daft realised something wasn’t right as it started to fight me back. So driving with my foot flat at 100km/h the car started to slow itself down and lose speed so eventually we were trundling along about 40km/h, good job the highways aren’t busy as the speed is a 110km/h!! With still some distance to go we trundled along not wanting to break down on the middle of nowhere with no phone signal!! We made it to a small town and pulled into the caravan park, where Martin suggested I turn it off and back on again ( you would never guess he worked in IT!).

It’s gonna b a long road!

Anyway I did just that and drove it a little and it seemed to be fine so we decided to proceed and do another few hundred km to a rest area. But typically just as we were too far to turn back to the town we had just left the car started playing up again and the engine management light was now on!! We managed to limp to our free stop and hope it would be okay in the morning as we still had about 500k to do before we hit a biggish town.

The next morning the car started fine and seem to drive fine, well for a while until it started doing what it had done yesterday so Martin just turned it off and on again while we were still moving and it seemed to reset it. So after doing this periodically for about 500km we finally make it to a town called Broken hill, which was in the middle of nowhere really but had a shopping centre and a pay phone, so we called Hippie who sent a recovery bloke out to look at the problem and all he did was put his computer on it, read the code which said fuel filter or something and booked us into a local garage, all was looking up! We booked into a campsite for the night after checking they had got a TV we could access at 2.30am to watch the last race of the F1 season!

Up bright and early then, not that we’d got much sleep anyway as the temp was still 30+ all night. So up we get to watch the race and although it doesn’t turn out how we hoped, it’s what we expected!! Then back to try and get a couple of hours sleep before taking the camper to the garage for 9am. Arriving at the garage at 9am with all hope of it being fixed being dashed as soon as the guy sees its a rental vehicle and refuses point blank to look at it, even though this is the garage the recovery guy booked it in with!! Are you kidding me?!!! He says we should take it Mitsubishi as it will still be under warranty, so after driving back to the shopping centre to use the pay phone and relay this information to Hippie, they send us to Toyota who couldn’t understand why we were there when it’s a Mitsubishi!! Speaking to Hippie again we go to Mitsubishi who say they are full until Thursday/Friday and it’s only Monday!!! By this point I’m getting a little bit p****d off with Hippie (although probably not really their fault) and thinking we are going to be stuck here for a while!! Mitsubishi recommend another garage down the road called Deeble, so off we go but yes they are full all week as well!! Letting us use their phone we get back onto Hippie and give them an update, while they try and find us another garage. Meanwhile a mechanic in the garage phones one of his mates who has a garage but he his full too! 

Finally Hippie find us a garage and tell us to get there for 12, so we turn up just after 12 and the guy says it's lunch time now, come back at 1!! ffs!! So in the meantime we go back to the shopping centre and ring Hippie to keep them posted then go back to the garage just after 1 and we are told the guy has just gone out but shouldn’t be long!! Think someones having a laugh but after waiting about 25 minutes he finally turns up and passes the car over to a mechanic who mangers to finally fix it within about 2 hours! Finally!!

We return to the shopping centre once more to use the pay phone again to ring Hippie and let them know it’s been fixed and as it's late afternoon we decided we can’t make it anywhere today so we decided to go and book back in at the campsite and get up early tomorrow to finally continue with our journey and move on from Broken hill!!