Overlander: there can only be one

It's all crazy. I was crying when I left Exmouth. The other passengers thankfully, studiously looked away. When we stop at Minilya roadhouse to switch busses at half-past one in the morning the air is cool for the first time in two months. I have never seen the Milky Way so bright. We have a replacement driver, a stand-in. He normally drives a school bus somewhere and the Greyhound is too much for him. His panic is tangible and by the time we reach the Overlander roadhouse he has ruined the gearbox utterly. We wait in pre-dawn light for the replacement from Shark Bay, nursing hot chocolate and bacon butties. Once the sun is up you can't walk outside, not even to look at the captive roos in the pen at the back of the building: the flies swarm upon you in incredible numbers. I'm looking at the map of Australia in the roadhouse. This part of the country is remote enough that the Overlander is actually listed, just like a village or town. They have nothing else to fill the expanse without putting in the petrol stations.

The replacement shows up a few hours later; a minibus chartered from some resort. It's a long ride down to Geraldton and the transfer onto a decent coach. I drift in and out of sleep until we get to Perth and my clearest memory is of a gigantic windfarm, sixty or seventy towers beating in unison against the offshore wind. Slint play 'Nosferatu Man'... "I saw the fortune-teller..."

Jem and Joan - once again - gave me bed and board for a couple of days. We got some mowing done in the orchard - the changes to their block are phenomenal. What was dusty and brown is now green and lush; where the bonfire sat hulking with decay is now a satisfying circle of ash.

The plane was delayed out of Perth but only by enough to kill the transfer time in Singapore. Jem and I had a beer in the lounge. I watched Apocalypto and drank beer. I pull a five millimetre spinifex splinter from the tip of my index finger and drink beer. The sunset, my christ, the sunset. Something small inside me breaks whenever I see these things; a band of red so dark, so deep, impossibly red, blood red, neon red, ferocious red, red forever... red forever, until it fades away and I drink beer. For a while I think I was the only passenger who noticed the lightning. For an hour we flew over, through, around a gigantic thunder storm. I was sitting next to a guy called Joel who plays in a band called the Howling Bells. He took some photos which he promised to email to me. The storm was colossal but silent through the plastic windows, vast strikes that shook the sky with light, the spill of jellyfish cities that crawl up through the cloud, the fug of white cloud that stops in a straight line... nine kilometres high and the cloud simply stops. The moon is a careless hanging crescent, it is spinning, the moon is spinning, the world is turning and I am not changing.

I slept most of the way. My earphones produced nothing but a dull tone from the in-flight movie system so I listened to the first three Mogwai records and slept. In the morning I wolfed down the pre-packaged sausage and scrambled eggs and watched the flightplan unfold for the last two hours. I love those things; watching them is a mix of Risk and Roald Dahl. Kiev - Kilimanjiro - Warsaw. Places I will probably never go to but enjoy all the more for not actually going... Algiers - Addis-Ababa - London.

Yeah, back to London. Back to the air thick with train fumes but it tastes clean to me. Back to the Underground, rude people, rushing people and checking constantly for my wallet. Internet cafes, job-hunting, exhaustion. Cold air, crisp air, not a mini-skirt in sight, bank notes bigger than before and those beautiful goddamn arches in Paddington station.