Contrary to popular belief, orienteering skills are not an important part of hitchhiking across Australia. Having found the Stuart Highway out of Sydney we simply went straight on across the Blue Mountains and the miles of desiccated, lizard-baking wasteland that is bizarrely known as ‘The Accessible Outback’ of South Australia.

Two weeks, and 1,500-miles, later a sign outside the Kulgera Pub advised us that we had finally reached ‘The Real Outback.’ This was the Northern Territory and any self-respecting ‘Top Ender’ will tell you that any other part of the Outback is strictly for Sheilas. Besides being illegal (‘technically’) in most Australian states I had read that hitching could be very difficult anywhere near urban centres. Since we had been about as far away from urban centres as it’s possible to get on this planet we’d had no problems…though we had had some nerve-racking rides. The driver of one of our first lifts had taken such an immediate liking to us that he felt compelled to blurt out that he’d been ‘out of circulation’ for the last 30 years. “In those days they’d lock you up for things that they just fine you for today,” he said, as Dougee and I exchanged worried glances.

Our next lift had come quickly – very quickly – in the form of a teenage delinquent who was driving his classic Holden sports car to Orange to pick up some parts that would apparently help it to exceed even the phenomenal speeds than he was currently making as he straightened the curves and hummocks of the Stuart Highway. “It’s pretty sleepy where you guys are heading,” he warned us. “I was out that way myself, few weeks back. Sat outside a pub for three hours and six cars passed…two of ‘em went both ways.”

Then shortly after dawn one morning we were on the Barrier Highway, patiently shoving our thumbs towards the unexpectedly gloomy clouds above South Australia. We were all set for a long wait because, beyond the garbage depot at the edge of town, there was little of any consequence before the desert met the salt water of The Spencer Gulf over three hundred miles away. So traffic was scarce and we were happily kicking a hackysack around on the blistering tarmac when a loaded estate car pulled up and with scant formality we were invited to chuck our stuff into the back.

Gali and Shirley were celebrating their liberation from Israeli military service with a happy-go-lucky Outback odyssey to a seemingly endless soundtrack of Shania Twain. Several hours later, as the Stuart Highway and headed northwards across Australia’s Red Centre, Crocodile Dougee was still roaring in on the chorus – “MAN! I feel like a women” – with an enthusiasm that I feared might not go down too well in the hard-bitten roadhouse where a hand-painted sign offered us the ‘Last Fuel for 300 Miles.’

We took the sign at face-value and joined a group of truckees guzzling icy cans of VB as they tuned into the TV traffic report: “The Stuart Highway, south of Alice is flooded and roadtrains carrying vital supplies have to wait. The rain’s still creating havoc for tourists. Many who have got this far, on their way to the Northern Territory, have simply got to turn around.

“A man who spent the last four days stranded on a remote track drinking water from puddles has made it home. He’s had a hot shower and a few beers to celebrate.” The last report inspired a chorus of ‘Fair Dinkum Mate!’ and brought a smile to all faces as the screen flashed to a drunken bushman, in ‘Oodnadatta Sunday-best’ (singlet and Blundy work-boots), struggling to set up a deckchair in his flooded backyard. We’d flown halfway around the world and set out to hitchhike 3,000 miles - driven by that frantic Pommy quest for sunshine - only to find that Australia’s ‘Red Centre’ had turned green and the mythical Great Australian Inland Sea was quickly becoming a reality with almost a third of Queensland underwater. The brief spell that Crocodile Dougee and I had chosen for our holiday was about to make Outback history as ‘The Big Wet.’

I took over the driving for a while as The Track rippled on and on into the heat haze and by the time we reached the Lasseter Highway to swing left towards Australia’s most famous icon I’d literally forgotten where the indicator lever was. As we drove onwards - past the rising swamps of the Lasseter Desert - I lost count of how many times I slow down or swerved to avoid mirages that I would not have believed in a few days ago.

Uluru has got to be the most photographed rock in the world and you would have to go a long way to find anybody who would not immediately recognise it if they tripped over it. Uluru is the local Aboriginal word for the delicate flutes that run down the side of what a colonial explorer had, with somewhat less poetry, named Ayer’s Rock in honour of a South Australian Premier. These smooth, shadowy ulurus were now streaked with ribbons of water that were combining to form a landscape that was more reminiscent of Gibraltar Rock than of the world’s largest monolith.

Average yearly rainfall on Uluru is 203mm but more than half of that fell in the single miserable night that Crocodile Dougee and I spent shivering in our tents there. Queen Elizabeth is renowned throughout much of Central Africa as the ‘The Rain Goddess’ on the basis of far less impressive statistics than these…but we didn’t wait around to find out what the local Pitjanjatjara people were calling us. Besides we still had 1,000 miles to cover and we had timed our journey perfectly so that we could fly out of Darwin just before the rainy season began!