From Here To There

1 | Indulgent Conceit

An indulgent conceit. Does travel broaden the mind? Or does travel broaden your ego? Convincing yourself that you are an intrepid adventurer is only a small part of the delusion involved in outlandish overland adventures. Charging through impoverished Third World landscapes in an air-conditioned, turbo-charged, self-contained mechanical bubble, barrelling into miscellaneous villages, and barely glimpsing vistas and landscapes worthy of meditation – this was the inevitable collateral damage in the rampage that our road trip became.

Don’t get me wrong, we had a fabulous time, but rather than romanticise our expedition I prefer to accentuate its shortcomings and let the reader judge, on balance, where the truth lies.

Somehow, I convinced myself that it was a good idea. Somehow, I convinced myself that it was do-able. Now I shake my head when I realise we drove 39,231 kilometres in six months and play a slide show of highlights in my head. We crossed twenty countries and went from our front gate in Melbourne to Trafalgar Square in London without using an airplane. We drove through a snowstorm in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, and across the Torugart Pass at Kashgar in western China into Kyrgyzstan in winter, all without snow chains. We diverted around horrific car crashes on mountain roads in teeming rain at Tongren in central China and avoided an Iranian Paykal sedan doing cartwheels on the freeway near Tehran. We wove around the shores of the Caspian Sea, navigated the desert in Turkmenistan and island-hopped by ferry from Timor to Flores to Sumbawa to Lombok and Bali in Indonesia, then on to Java and Sumatra.

We learned to say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ in nearly thirty languages and dispensed fluffy toy koalas that traumatised small children in obscure mountain pockets from Laos to Kurdistan. We threw a frisbee across borders and taught customs officers from Timor-Leste to Uzbekistan how to drop-punt an Aussie Rules football. We gave a hitchhiking soldier a lift on the Armenia – Azerbaijan border, earning smooth passage through roadblocks for our charity.

We ate bark and ox blood and dog and worms and pigs’ ears and eel and blood sausage and curries so hot we nearly fell off our chairs. We bribed police across Indonesia, Cambodia, China and Turkmenistan. We ignored parking tickets in Jakarta, Ulaan Baatar, Milan, London and nearly got towed away in Paris. We still have credit on our freeway passes in Singapore and Switzerland. We flouted London’s congestion charge and Ashgabat’s curfew. We went down one-way streets and were threatened with traffic fines in Tehran and Samarkand. We had one puncture in -13 degrees in snow in No Man’s Land between China and Kyrgyzstan and a buckled wheel and ruined tyre from a massive rock in the Altai Mountains in Kazakh Mongolia.

We dented someone’s bumper bar in Cambodia (US$5 compensation) and left black rubber tyre marks on the side of a marauding swerving taxi in Turpan in Muslim Uyghur China. We got lost everywhere. We did not take a GPS but used maps and a compass. We asked for directions in mime. We never ran out of fuel. We paid a whopping A$2.66 a litre for diesel in Hovd in western Mongolia, and filled up for the total of an astonishing A$2 for 144 litres in Jolfa in western Iran. (That is not a typing error – 144 litres for less than A$2 or A$0.0125 a litre.) Nothing on the car broke except the CD player jammed. We had nothing stolen from our luggage or car anywhere. Jack was pick-pocketed in Jatujak flea market in Bangkok and that was the only time we were preyed upon. People refused payment for food and fruit in Indonesia, Laos, all over China and in Uzbekistan.

We visited Catholic cathedrals in Timor-Leste and Italy and France, Buddhist temples in Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos and China, Hindu shrines in Bali, shamans’ tents in Mongolia, mosques in Indonesia, Malaysia, Central Asia and Turkey and an ancient synagogue in Uzbekistan. We went weeks without seeing tourists. When we did see them they reminded us of ourselves and the sad reality of our own journey. We were not intrepid adventurers after all – just tourists with a car and a different journey. We met people who did not know what or where Australia was, and we met people who had never seen Europeans before.

We squabbled over food and farting, snoring and sneezing. We cried about missing home and Jan and Nigel. We laughed about everything. We spent a fortune on phone calls. We met travellers from Slovenia, Holland, Belgium, France, England, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, Turkey, the USA, Greece, Spain, Germany, Hong Kong and all across Asia.

We haggled in dollars Australian, American and Singaporean, and in rupiah, ringgit, baht, kip, yuan, tugreg, som, manat, rial, lira, euro and pounds.

We passed armoured cars and tanks in Iran, sandbagged soldiers in Turkey and fighter jets in China. We watched land-mine clearance crews in Laos and got caught in an anti-government protest in Bangkok. We were frisked by soldiers in Uzbekistan and questioned by police in Turkmenistan. We got past internet censorship in Tehran and China and survived with no communications at all in Mongolia.

We were never in fear for our safety nor in danger – except from bad drivers.

We did what so many people say they want to do, but so few actually get to do. We took time out from work and study, and the earth did not swallow us. We spent six months, twenty-four hours a day, in a car or a small hotel room and can still talk to each other. We both missed home far more than expected.

It was a total folly – and it was the best thing you can do. I wouldn’t do it again, but I would recommend it to anyone.

2 | Anything Exciting These Holidays?

Our trip now seems like a dream. It was my whole world. It was my existence and everything that I did was part of it; from sleeping to eating to talking in other tongues to venturing outside of normality. Or my normality.

Then, when it finished, when I woke, it no longer had any bearing on my life other than memories tingling my subconscious and an ability to provide anecdotal jokes about Turkmenistan and the like. Bits of it are hazy and come back to me in waves, provoked by news reports of impossibly faraway events and by photos that assure me that these absurdities really happened, and that I was witness to them. Every now and then I begin to recite parts of our trip but I feel as I do when I annoyingly explain dreams. And, like dreams, these memories are only kept alive in my mind and words fail to re-create the past.

The days before we left just … happened. They were always going to disappear in a flurry of goodbyes and last minutes. I have no clear recollection of them. All I remember is after my last exam, on the Friday before we left, a gorgeous girl from one of my university tutorials asked me, ‘So, you up to anything exciting over the holidays?’ I wanted to jump up and down and scream that I was about to go on a romp through almost two dozen countries. I wanted to tell her excitedly about the snow-bound borders where the ice disappears into the mountains and the mountains disappear into the clouds, and about the deserts where you go to see nothing but your own footprints sunk in the sand and the occasional Coke can; to tell her that changing a tyre in no-man’s-land between China and Kyrgyzstan in a minus-8-degree snowstorm would leave me with frozen snot on my upper lip, and that I would be threatened by burly Timorese cockfight trainers; that there is still a KGB in Central Asia and that they would grab me and attempt to arrest me; that I would look up and down and across volcanic vistas that would decrease the value of all other views in life; that a blind, four-year old Chinese girl would break my heart and that that same heart would almost be brought to a stop several times by motorists of various nationalities … and that I’d do all that and more … With. My. Dad. But I didn’t say it because it would have sounded, well, a bit far-fetched.

She would have told me I was dreaming.

3 | Man of Lists

I am a man who makes lists. Once something is on the list, it must get done. Somehow, sometime.

From Jan on www.MelbourneToLondon.com

Sunday evening, June 30, 2008

I feel like my husband has been having an affair for the last six months.

He has been conducting secret telephone calls in a way that women always know is leading to something. He has been constantly emailing elusive and mysterious people to set up endless rendezvous in exotic locations throughout the world. Do not underestimate the amount of time, energy and effort my husband has spent in nurturing this affair. He has investigated, researched and collected every conceivable gadget the twenty-first century can offer him to ensure that the whole world knows about his new fancy.

What makes it even worse is he has seduced my young and impressionable nineteen-year-old son to accompany him on this wild affair.

This obsession my husband has been having has left me with a concoction of emotions. I have felt alienated and anxious because I am no longer the bastion of his life … the brick, the grounding force that has always brought him back to earth. I have felt insanely jealous because he is going to conduct this deliberate and premeditated affair in such glamorous and bizarre locations throughout the world.

And now I just feel plain abandoned, dumped and jilted. This Sunday morning at 6.20 he decided he was going to consummate the affair he has lusted after for many years. He packed his bags and left … Well, he did have to wait around for a few extra minutes while Jack downloaded the last CD onto his iPod.

To look on the brighter side he has left me with the house and its contents, chequebook, his dog … And has been so distracted he has even left me to determine the future of the contents of his shed … his cars and his crap!!!

And just maybe my nineteen-year-old son is not so gullible. Perhaps he can ultimately persuade his father to see this phase as a temporary midlife-crisis thing and in six months’ time he will convince him to return home to dodder into old age with me.

Jon and Jack, I miss you already and you have only been gone for ten hours. While there have been, and still are, multiple negative thoughts rushing through my poor befuddled brain I mostly feel ecstatically happy for you both. I know that you keep each other alert mentally and spiritually. Jack, you will probably even be able to persuade Jon to keep fit and healthy. I know the remarkable bond you have both developed will only strengthen.

Aaagh, and when I start sounding a bit pathetic it is obviously time to say … Goodnight.

Jon, on www.MelbourneToLondon.com

June 28, 2008 Sniffles and tears

Halfway through the party, no idea why, it suddenly dawned on me. We were not going to see any of these people, all so dear to us, for half a year. We were going to just be gone. No puff of smoke, no ‘shazzam’ — just an absence.

I cried. Saying goodbye, to Jan, my parents, family, good friends, the dog … once I started, I couldn’t hold back.

And today, we packed the car with plastic tubs full of … well, I am not even sure what anymore. But I am certain it was all terribly important when it went in there.

And now the reality bites. I confess to feeling profound guilt that we are heading off on this incredible indulgence — and Jan will wave us goodbye. I feel selfish beyond words.

Is it in the DNA of the control freak to make a list and then obediently follow it? I always have one underway. It is a constant thread in my life. From the unmanageable (finish tax return) to the mundane (buy dog food). Once a job is on the list, there is no escaping it.

I started the list for our trip nine months before we left. But the yearning really began when I was a twenty-one-year-old backpacker in London, in 1977. I can clearly recall walking one of those identikit London streets, all two-storey homes, no front yard, bay windows and tiny front porches, stairs up from windows buried below the street, cars jammed tight against each other. As I wove through the Austins and the Vauxhalls, a camel-coloured Land Rover demanded closer inspection. What most caught my eye was the numberplate. White letters on a black background, ‘VIC’ centred above it. On the tailgate, the inevitable Aussie flag and the oval sticker: ‘AUS’.

I stopped and stared. I could not move for a long time – someone had driven this car across the world. Then and there I made myself a promise that I would one day do the same.

So thirty and more years later – June 2008 – as Jack and I heroically conquer the first set of traffic lights just after six on a Sunday morning, I visualise arriving in London, hopefully by New Year’s Eve, 2009. Six months driving and, by my reckoning, about 25,000 kilometres lying ahead. Huge gaps in our itinerary, chaotic incomplete arrangements for visas and permits, barriers and hurdles to clear all along the way. Six months away from work, six months of adventure – or six months of slog?

I cannot stop thinking of Jan, sobbing at the front gate as we deserted her moments before. Seared into my eyes is the image of Jan jollied along by the ten or twelve hardy family and friends who came in the cold and the dark to wave us off. I feel indescribable guilt and foolishness and seriously consider then and there taking the next turn, admitting defeat and going home. I can cope with the humiliation of retreat. That is a mere trifle against the heartache and pain of separation. Why am I driving away from what I love and care about most, to who knows what?

And now I will admit to a gnawing worry that we might never make it home. Have I hugged Jan for the last time? Am I condemning her to years of cursing me for my recklessness and stubborn selfishness? Will someone have to sort through my junk, the knick-knacks and mementoes in the drawers in my desk, the crammed shelves of hidden treasures in my shed, sort out the clothes for the op shop and lament at the folly of it all? Will the dog ever rush to the door to jump onto my thigh again? Am I leading our younger son to danger, or worse? Was my mother right when she asked me not to go? My father cautioned against our chosen route, but my mother just bluntly said, ‘Please do something else.’

At work, jokes had been made about us disappearing, never to be seen again. ‘Just the numberplate, drifting down the Mekong River … will we ever find out what happened to Jon?’ was one variation on the theme. Colleagues had asked if we were taking a gun, bulletproof vests or bodyguards for the scary bits. Was I naive and foolhardy in my confident assurances that the world was not a scary place, that we must not just overcome but actively dispel fear, that people are people and that we were just going for a drive? My theory is that if you live in Flores it is not a big deal to take the ferry to Sumbawa or Lombok. If you live in Singapore you can drive into Malaysia anytime, if you are in Thailand it is not that special to drive to Cambodia or Laos. The people in Kyrgyzstan drive to Uzbekistan, Turks drive into Greece – we were just stringing a lot of those local trips together, and adding some rarely crossed land borders to spice it up a bit.

Another complication is whether or not I can disguise my profession from the tinpot despots in some of the less hospitable countries we’re going to. Journalists are arrested for working without permits in half a dozen of the countries we are to go through. Turkmenistan bans all foreign journalists, no media is allowed into the Ferghana Valley in Uzbekistan, Iran deports undeclared foreign media, China detains them, especially in Xinjiang, the Muslim west, and Indonesia is fussy about who goes to its remote territories. Eastern Turkey is off limits because of the Kurdish rebellion … the list goes on. Can I conceal my identity and profession for six months and get away with it?

And I’m embarking on a career risk as well. It is unheard of for anyone who does what I do to take a long break. A radio host has only one thing to offer – their presence. If you are not there, you do not exist. Media is fickle at the best of times, and the golden rule is ‘never take a holiday’. And if you do, make sure that the person who fills in for you is not very good, so that the audience feel relieved when you return. I have no such luxury. My morning show, a voracious monster that I’ve ridden for twelve years, every morning from half past eight to noon, interviewing around forty or fifty people a week, about anything and everything, is in my absence being looked after by someone far more able than me. Who will I be without my programme and what will my programme be without me? How will I cope without the ego patting and forelock tugging that absurdly seems to be the undeserving lot of my profession? Can I still relate to the real world outside the cocoon of my own comfortable patch? Big fish in small pond …

And then there is the possible cultural clash, the tension of ethnic identity. Will a Jewish adventurer such as I am be less welcome in so many militant Islamic countries, especially Iran? What about a Jewish journalist ‘spying’ on the Islamic revolution? Our intentions could so easily be misunderstood. All these and more churn away in the back of my mind while I research how to get a permit to drive a foreign car through Uzbekistan.

Jack wipes his eyes in the passenger seat. He turns up the music on the iPod and plays the same song three times. I do not know Whitley then, but his song with the wonderful refrain ‘I want this more than life itself’ will become our unofficial anthem. Then he cues The Waifs singing in harmony, ‘I’m in London still …’ as we turn onto the tollway and lock in the cruise control for the first time, tears blurring the view through the windscreen.

Eventually I manage to smile as I look through the windows of other cars on the freeway. Where are they going? Why are they on the road at 6 am on a Sunday? Is anyone going on an exotic journey like ours? The people inside that Ford ahead, are they going to Africa? And the van behind, maybe en route to Russia? Or just to visit their mum in Sunbury?

There is only so much planning you can do for an adventure like this. We have tried to be ruthless in deciding what to take and what to leave. Clothes for hot and cold weather, medicines and first aid, three days of sardines and crackers, a spirit stove, two large water containers, car spares and tools, and an entire tub of electrical chargers, plugs, cables and electronic gadgetry have finished off the load. Two laptops, cameras, a satellite phone and EPIRB rescue beacon have filled the gear bags on the back seat. We have no tent, no GPS, no car fridge, no winch nor weapons. I have been inspired by and absorbed ideas, experiences and regrets from locals who have recently gone down the road less travelled and tried to learn from them all. Shirley Hardy-Rix and Brian Rix rode their BMW motorbike to Australia overland from Britain, before the terrific epics of Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman. Heather Burge, a grandmother from Ferntree Gully, cycled from Beijing to Istanbul, intrepid beyond anything I could imagine. Adrian Scott learned to ride his motorbike by falling off along the Road of Bones across Siberia and Russia. A friend from years back, Phil McMillan, together with two mates, rode his motorbike from London across Russia to Vladivostok a few years ago during long-service leave from teaching. We have the cushy seats and huge carrying capacity of a four-wheel drive turbo diesel to get us where we are going.

From each and every traveller’s tale, I gleaned knowledge and guidance. Things to take, things to leave behind, skills to acquire, people to talk to, stuff to buy … on and on it went. I became the dinner party bore, rattling off information about visas for Tajikistan, the difference between Thuraya and Iridium satellite phones and animated analysis of the fuel capacity and range of a Prado versus a Pajero. No one else cared, but my mind was firmly locked on to a path with only one end.

Jan and I had always planned on doing ‘the drive’ when I retired. A few years back, Jan decided not to go, and so I abandoned my fantasy, resigned to lesser adventures. But when we were en route between Amman in Jordan and Damascus in Syria on a Middle East family holiday in 2006, we crossed the land border between the two in a hire car. As we queued at the frontier to have our papers checked and the vehicle searched, Jan turned from the front seat and said: ‘This is what the drive would be like. Jack, you should go with your dad in your gap year …’ I had just been offered long-service leave and was looking at options on how to use that time. Jan’s suggestion was totally out of the blue, but I knew she was serious when soon after we got home from Syria she announced one evening that her good friend Marcia had offered to come and stay for a six-month-long pyjama party while we were away, if we were serious about driving to London.

Jack deliberated for a week and returned with one precondition. ‘I have to be in charge of music,’ he stipulated and, after I stopped giggling, I agreed before he could change his mind. The opportunity to spend so long together, to share a unique adventure, to get to know your own offspring beyond the daily grind of ‘Clean up your room’ and ‘Have you done your homework?’ seemed too good to believe. I knew it would not be a cakewalk, that there could be hiccups, but none that seemed worthy of serious hesitation or negotiation. How many fathers yearn for more time with their kids? Who doesn’t?

Some practical things had to happen. We both attended a first-aid course, and Jack was despatched for an advanced driver course as he would have held a driver’s licence for less than a year by the time we were to leave. He hated the tag of ‘official photographer’ but took to it with vigour, learned what all the buttons on the complex camera could do and spent time with brilliant mentors, thus unearthing a capacity to see things through a viewfinder that his father was not even aware were there. A visit to the bank manager secured an overdraft, and multiple visits to specialist off-road garages helped me work out what was sensible and what would be wasted in fitting out a car.

For a few months I flirted with the idea of seeking sponsorship for our trip. Car industry contacts flushed out an offer of a free off-road luxury wagon, but as we discussed what they expected in return it became clear that it would compromise my work on ABC Radio. How could I return to my job and be seen to be independent in asking questions about, for example, the future of the car industry, if I had accepted a free car from one of those very companies? How could I hold a business to account for a consumer complaint if I was in their pocket? There is no such thing as a free lunch, so I swallowed hard and paid for everything myself.

The last few months before leaving are now a blur. Visas and permits, designing and writing for the website, preparing and kitting out the car, first aid, medicine, money, maps, cameras, power supplies, backups, gadgets, fancy shoes and the eternal search for the perfect coats – the list got longer, not shorter. Jack had started university and had teething troubles, then exams. I wanted him to help but he had his own list. Researching the trip and planning everything well into the night, on top of getting up every day before five in the morning to do the daily radio show, meant I was less than useful for anything else. And now I have no idea how I compartmentalised my life the way I did. But once the list was written …

The plan is to cover as much of the trip by car as possible. We will drive north, jump on a ship for the shortest journey to the nearest foreign port – Dili, in Timor – and go island hopping from Timor through Indonesia and beyond, into Southeast Asia and then across China, the ’stans, Iran, eastern Europe and eventually to London. Simple really. We want to get as far as we can on Day 1, as we need to get to Darwin in four days to catch a ship. Otherwise it is weeks until the next one. That schedule equates to about 1000 kilometres every day, an impossibly tight timeline if you keep the promise to only drive on outback roads in the safety of daylight. During winter there is less daylight to use, so we can’t waste any time at all.

The tollway signs and city traffic, twenty-four-hour petrol outlets and crowded subdivisions give way to empty roads and farms and trees. We sleep overnight in a grungy motel on the edge of the highway in Port Augusta in South Australia. Day 1 and we are on schedule. Dawn on Monday sees us on the bitumen, and by office hours we are at the old space base at Woomera so I call Darwin and confirm to the shipping company in Darwin, Perkins, that we are on the way. ‘Your ship is cancelled … it is in dry dock in Singapore for repairs …’ is the news from Kylie, our contact in Darwin, and is greeted with a numb silence in the desert at our end. I feel at first furious, then frustrated, then resigned and go through the motions of asking about the next ship – a two-week delay. Day 2 and our itinerary is blown to bits, the laptop modem will not work, cruise control on the car is playing up – things do not go to plan.

‘Better get used to it,’ Jack says and he is right.

4 | First You Have to Leave Australia

In which we avoid crocodiles, visit sacred caves and rock art and share silly juice. Our delayed trip to Dili is on the MV Kathryn Bay which we have to board by Wednesday afternoon, July 16. There are worse places to be forced to spend a week than Darwin.

From Jon on www.MelbourneToLondon.com

Sump Oil Gravy, July 3, 2008

Roadhouse schnitzel with sump oil gravy for dinner yesterday. Territory style. Everything deep fried in batter. Even the batter has batter. Salad – deep fried. Well, almost. Dinner tonight – in Tennant Creek – was Thai beef salad. Thai because it tied me up for about ten minutes chewing each mouthful before I could swallow.

The Stuart Highway is like a giant conveyor belt. Grey nomads towing caravans one after another as far as the eye can see. Having a ball, they are, except the couple arguing in the stopover about whose turn it was to be packing the food away. Why should domestic bliss change just cos you are on the road?

Off we go to Arnhem Land. A phone call or three and we have a permit and a ‘cabin’ at Oenpelli, now called Gunbalanya, or as it is also spelled, Kunbarllanjnja. You first ask about the river height of the East Alligator River at Cahills Crossing and head off in time to avoid high tide, when the crossing is flooded. So three hours or thereabouts to Jabiru and instead of going south to Kakadu we go northeast on red dust roads into the edge of Arnhem Land.

At the river we stop and watch the fishing – about a dozen people casting optimistically for the elusive barramundi. While we watch them, crocs watch us. One huge Jurassic remnant is a mere 20 metres away from fishermen knee deep in the river. As the tide reaches the crossing and the outflow stops and the inwards flow from the ocean flushes the river, the crocs come alive, snapping and lunging at the fish, sometimes half out of the water. We have seen dolphins herd fish into the shore to feed – this is the croc equivalent. They get a good meal. The fishermen barely budge, such is the hypnotic effect of trying to catch a barra.

One older and more cunning bloke winds in a massive fish, which is greeted with sighs and muttered curses by everyone else. Apparently he does it every day, drawing on all his twenty years-plus experience.

Gunbalanya makes us welcome. We start at the community council and are introduced to Donald, the Native Title holder. We sit for hours with Rammi and Gabriel as they paint at the art centre. Football is our common language, until we grab some food before the supermarket shuts and watch the sunset over the lagoon and adjacent mountains.

Early next morning Donald gives us a quick guided tour of the town before passing us to his ‘cousin’ Moses, who agrees for the regular fee to take us to the famed rock art. We go to the Dog Dreaming, and then Injalak, site of numerous remarkable rock paintings. The view across the flood plains is straight from a coffee table book: breathtaking.

Several hours of fishing and lost lures confirm my failure as a hunter-gatherer and leave us empty-handed.

Moses tells us to join him for a barbecue at the social club that evening. The entire town attends; only light beer on sale. The community owns and controls the club. Local security and ‘night patrol’ members wander the lawns, keeping an eye out for trouble. ‘Too much silly juices,’ warns Moses, using a description of grog that is totally new but makes immediate sense.

Jack always struggles to last more than ten minutes without a ball in his hands. The cheap footy we bought in Alice Springs serves as the perfect ice-breaker in Gunbalanya. Never visit an Aboriginal community without one. It also helps keep us active, and stops our backs from cracking up completely. Jack makes me do sit-ups and stretches every night, a sort of personal trainer on the road. It does me the world of good.

We head back to Darwin and camp out in the spare room of an old friend, Tony Fitzgerald. He organises a picnic in Litchfield Park at Tjaynera Falls, even though he is battling cancer (which will sadly claim him within a year). We hang out at Parap market, Mindil beach, visit the Magistrates’ Court (always a good free show in any new town anywhere in the world) and get the car serviced. Jack hangs out with Tony’s son Gus and they discover a common interest in photography and sit and talk ‘f-stops’ and Photoshop shortcuts, as well as going for sweaty runs through the mangroves.

Twenty-five years ago, before I started broadcasting with the ABC, I was a lawyer and worked on a complicated and lengthy case with the Public Trustee of the NT, John Flynn. He is as well connected a Territorian as there can