Driving Through the Northern Territory

The life of a motoring journalist is often hard to pass off as actual work. You get flown to launches, get fed good food, sit through the obligatory and often very boring product seminar and then get let loose in cars for a bit of a drive before some more food arrives that night. But every once and while there comes a trip that's virtually impossible to convince your other half is actually a job, and more importantly one that you must do at all costs.

At least that's what happened when Suzuki New Zealand sent me a letter inviting me to the Northern Territory, a helicopter trip to Ayers Rock/Uluru, and some camping and dinner under the desert stars. Oh, and a drive of the facelifted Grand Vitara.

Once I had promised that I would somehow one day afford to take the family to Australia the trip was on.

Now, you'd have to be living under a rock in the desert - presumably not one in Australia itself - to realize it is a big country. But the true size of Australia was slammed home when I reread the itinerary and found that while it would take just under four hours to get from Auckland to Sydney, it was yet another three hour via jet to Ayers Rock airport. That's an awful lot of time to be spending in a 737 with a seat pitch optimised for the largely Asian tourist market that flies into Ayers rock on a clockwork basis.

But first there was an overnight at Sydney airport, at a hotel that sat right next to the runway, but inexplicably it took 15 minutes to get there by bus. Most of the journos had a great view of the runway from their rooms - I was treated to a truck rental business and a billboard that wanted to tell me how to improve my sex life.

We had a great night in the traditional vein of the motoring journo business - lots of drink and lots of food. The next day the mini buses were assembled to get us back to the airport. I jumped into the first available van, and we sat there in the Toyota Previa while the Russian driver disappeared into the hotel for 15 minutes on what would turn out to be a deliberate ploy to allow who I could only assume was his brother, to get his own minibus to the hotel and score a full load.

At the airport the driver had a particularly impressive argument with a parking warden, which almost came to blows. Our driver was not only a master of broken English; he was aspiring to shatter it altogether. However, we boarded our plane without more international tension.

When we arrived at Ayers Rock we were greeted with something right out of the 1970s - an air stair rather than an air bridge. The ground crew rolled a step up to both the front and rear doors, and despite everyone onboard being told that the rearward door was open, one Asian woman determinedly stared forwards while blocking the aisle and leaving all the more clued up passengers to exit the aircraft behind her.

Peripheral vision, plus a few nasty looks from other passengers soon won over and we trooped out the rear door to meet the hot red heart of Australia - which had reached a whole maximum of 13 degrees Celcius. Not exactly what I had expected.

Then we were packed into a bus that delivered us to the Sails Resort, a name which didn't make much sense since the only water for a thousand kilometers comes from a tap - it hadn't rained there since February.

The resort, while apparently built in the early 1990s was seemingly from the University Dormitory School of Design circa 1970. Oh, and the air conditioning in my room didn't work. It was probably because the temperature control unit was hanging from the wall by a couple of wires. Good that the last thing I needed in the 'soaring' 13 degree Celcius temperature was air con.

The first afternoon at Ayers Rock was spent with an assortment of reptiles that call the middle of Australia home while the Suzuki staff were all busy fine tuning their presentation back at the 'resort'. We got to handle several lizards and snakes, none of which were any danger to us, unless we were around three inches long, covered in fur and had outsized incisors.

In any case the Boa Constrictor wasn't doing much constricting as it hung around my neck. Probably the most dangerous animals out there were the Aussie journos, who have been known to bite when cornered.

We then had the Suzuki Grand Vitara facelift presentation, which can be boiled down to it being 30mm longer at the front, looking slightly different, and getting a bigger 3.2 litre V6 engine with 165kW under the bonnet, a new 122kW 2.4 litre four pot, ESP across the board, and the retention of the 1.6 litre three door model. There was plenty of other stuff, but those were the majors.

The next couple of days though, would be spent attempting to destroy the new Grand Vitara, which would push home the idea that it is still a durable off road vehicle, rather than a semi-butch soft roader.

That night we had dinner under the stars, which was nice, if a little cold, with most of us bundled up like polar explorers. We were warned beforehand to bring something warm, so I didn't get the pleasure of seeing journos in T-shirts rapidly turning into ice sculptures. I think it was a good night - can't really remember anything after the first hour or so. They had lots of beer available.

The next morning we assembled for our great tour of Ayers Rock, or Uluru, via helicopter. True to recent form I was late for the bus - my second strike of the launch, but as it turned out they had to refuel the helicopters before we lifted off into the early morning sunlight, giving the more nervous flyers a little longer to get their blood pressure elevated.

Once in the air we traveled in a long strung out line, which unfortunately dismissed any idea of reenacting that scene out of Apocalypse Now. I was in the fastest helicopter though, so had the pleasure of cruising past the slow choppers and waving a lot.

The strange thing was that Ayers Rock wasn't the highlight of the trip when seen from the air. It is, after all, just an extremely big rock.

The real highlight was the Olgas, a formation of domes sticking out of the desert, and named for a completely bizarre reason, after Queen Olga of Württemberg, by an explorer called Ernest Giles who had never even met the woman. Given that Giles reached the Olgas via walking through the desert we can forgive him for having somewhat of a fried brainpan by the time he arrived.

OK, the actual story is that the guy who financed Giles expeditions made him name them the Olgas, but my version is so much better.

From there we landed at a cattle station in the middle of nowhere which became home to eight helicopters and three twin engine planes. It felt a bit like a secret CIA mission to be honest (I have a very good, if rather paranoid, imagination).

This was the third day of the launch and the first time we set eyes on a real life facelifted Grand Vitara. There were 25 of them in a line that stretched far out into the scrub, and true to form, the one that I was to drive was 24^th in line. At least I wasn't last.

Take that, number 25!

The next thing I know, we're on the main road from Ayers Rock to Alice Springs. It's a strip of rutted, scrambled red dirt and stone that for some reason is around 25 metres wide. This is where the trial began, as the dust and corrugations were so bad we could only maintain around 60km/h at which speed the entire vehicle vibrated like a bed in a Las Vegas budget hotel.

At points the steering wheel went so blurry I couldn't really see it. The road gradually improved, although it retained the same dimensions and the air quality remained the dusty equivalent of Beijing just before the Olympics thanks to 25 Suzuki's belting their way down the track.

We eventually pulled off at an off road driving area, again in the middle of nowhere, where we did all the usual off road things - climbing hills in the vehicles, coming back down off them, getting stuck in sand, swearing, and generally scaring the living daylights out of the Japanese Suzuki representatives who clung to the seatbacks as we often went vertical.

That night we camped out under a suspiciously fragile looking cliff, and once again the beer came out and everything went a little fuzzy round the edges.

Things got a little sharper when I stumbled out of my tent in the middle of the night, tripped up over the edge of the tent and gracefully broke my fall by heroically plunging my left hand into the depths of a Spinifex bush.

If you don't know what sticking your hand into Spinifex is like then you haven't inserted your hand into an industrial threshing machine. I spent the next 45 minutes picking thorns out of my hand by torch light.

I stopped counting at 37.

By then, an even more pressing need had to be met. Urinating outdoors has its own problems, and that's without including the various snakes, spiders, and the possibility of being run over by a camel.

I was surprised therefore, when the sun came up, to find that I had been passing water on an ancient beach rock pool. I'm not sure how many millions of years ago the rocky shelf I had relieved myself upon had been formed, but it was very obvious that here was a series of rock pools - almost in the exact middle of Australia - where, quite obviously, there hasn't been any water for a substantial amount of time.

We were due to get up at around 6am the next morning, but as so often happens, some bugger starts driving a Grand Vitara in circles around the campsite at 5am, so at least I got to see the sun come up. We were all to be transported to the showers at a local camping ground (which for some reason called itself a resort - a word somewhat overused in the Outback).

The Aussie driver in my Grand Vitara got a little too impatient when the vehicle in front plunged into a soup of bull dust, which bears no relation to a bull at all, but certainly resembles a heck of a lot of dust.

We entered the cloud and instantly lost contact with anything resembling a track, or pretty much anything else more substantial than talcum powder. It was just as well the driver decided to slow down a little, because the next thing to materialise in front of the Grand Vitara was a tree. Two minutes later, when the dust settled, we found ourselves a full 15 metres away from the track.

That wasn't the only near miss of the launch. One journalist hit a rut and it spat the Grand Vitara out of the track into a tree (the same one a Suzuki representative had hit the day before) and another journo decided to stop in the middle of the bull dust cloud once vision had been obliterated, only to find another stationary Grand Vitara a handsbreadth away on the left hand side.

But at the end of the launch we were all satisfied that the facelifted Grand Vitara is better on road than before, and pretty much unbreakable off road. And for the record, almost all the thorns have worked their way out of my hand.