The South Australia Incident

About 9 months ago(late 2017) my fiancé and I started talking travel. I originally wanted to backpack around America but we compromised with backpacking around Australia. Which now that I think about is probably a better option especially for our first real travel experience. So after a lot of research and decisions we had decided to buy a van and convert into a compact house and be on our way. We struggled for a good few months to find a van we liked in our price range, and any that we had our eyes on sold extremely quickly. After having no luck locally we made some calls and had a bunch of vans lined up to look at in Melbourne. By the time we got to Melbourne all of the vans we had lined up had already sold except one. We went and looked at this van, had my uncle look at it (experienced in the motor vehicle trade) and everyone was impressed. So we brought the van thinking we got a good deal and everything was sweet. I spent the next 3 months building it into our moving home. Bed, storage, kitchen the works.

Early May we left for South Australia were we had picked up work on a citrus farm. The first 2 months were awesome we had a heap of fun picking fruit making friends I even had the chance to shoot photos from a light aircraft piloted by our fruit farm boss. At this point we were starting to get ourselves sorted to travel through central Australia as our work was running out in a fortnight or so when we hit a snag. Driving to work oneway the oil light lit up on the dash. Immediately I checked the oil and everything seemed fine, we were under a km to work so we decided to drive the remaining way. I called my dad a mechanic of 30 odd years and asked his opinion, he suggested getting it checked out even though he thought it would most likely be a faulty oil sensor a common fault on this model.

This is were things went really down hill. Upon inspection a whole lot of small problems in the engine were found causing some major issues and we got told the cheapest and most economical way to sort things out would be to replace the engine. This sounds bad but we got told it would only be a few grand and our warranty company was going to cover us for the majority of the damage. frustrated we agreed knowing we should only need to pay 1000 dollars or so. 2 days later the worst case scenario became a reality. Ford transit vans are very common meaning there engines are too, but what we were told was a regular Ford Transit van turned out to be something a little rarer. So apparently Ford made tried making a 2 litre transit but after only a few years they ceased as the model was full of problems. meaning the engine we were looking for was only made for a short period of time and due to faults nigh impossible to find a running one. We had the mechanic, my dad, my uncle and myself look throughout the internet, and after hundreds of calls we were only able to find one engine and we were not even sure of the condition. On top of that the engine was expensive, like really expensive. The engine alone would set us back roughly $6000 dollars and thats not including installation so needless to say that was not an option.

an Ariel shot I was able to take during a light aircraft ride

So we found ourselves stuck in South Australia in a van with an engine ready to fail at anytime, work running out and no real way to get home with or without our stuff. Then thinking about it realising we had no home or jobs to go back to any way. At least in South Australia we had a place to live and leads to more work, so we decided too stay for a while longer not that we really had a choice. The following month was one of the hardest times in my life, trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do. We were lucky enough to have an engagement party back home coming up and some nearby family were able to make a detour and pick us up and bring us and majority of our stuff home.

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The South Australia Incident