The car breakdown service providers of Australia’s eastern seaboard must have been doing quite a few home starts over the last week or so. That’s if they could find the cars in question. The deluge that affected the city of Brisbane and vast swathes of the state Queensland took everyone there by surprise, creating scenes where cars in their dozens could be seen floating down rivers, some for many miles. The whole sad episode brought back my own Australian memories.
I’ve been to that part of the world myself and found it to be an amazing place. And I found that to many Australians, the car is essential to life, such are the distances that frequently need to be covered.
When I was there I had the good fortune to know a young Dutchman called Lenny, who had recently invested in an orange 1978 Nissan Skyline. As well as looking superb, it had the additional charm of having a green plastic frog attached to the bonnet. I had bumped into Lenny several times up the east coast of Oz, the final time was – hard to believe – slogging our guts out in a banana plantation in Tully, not far from Cairns. We took it as a sign and decided to take a long road trip back down the coast together.
We covered a distance in a few days that had taken us three months or more to cover, stopping off at beaches and beauty spots along the way, sleeping in our tents or sometimes in the car itself.
If you ever get the chance to drive down this strip of coastline, I urge you to take it. But if you choose to go in a 1978 Nissan Skyline driven by a Dutchman who insists on driving on the right, make sure you get your car breakdown cover sorted first.
Breakdown Cover from 
