Want wet Swedish babes on your phone? Text BABE 21 to get skintily-clad Natasha. Text BABE 22 to help Helen take her top off…

For a long time now I’ve had a ‘soft spot’ for Swedish girls, be they wet or dry, clean or dirty. Last winter I spent too much time watching late night Australian TV, which is full of ads featuring gorgeous blondes writhing about on beds. So I decided to set out on an epic quest for my own BABE 21.

Where is the best place to find Swedes in Australia? In the snowfields? Or sunning themselves on the Whitsundays?

Desperate & dateless

I had to find out, so I hired an old Toyota Prado and rallied a couple of similarly desperate friends. After a long drive north from Melbourne, our first port of call was Jindabyne a small town in NSW, which is conveniently located near the snowfields. There must be at least a couple of Swedes here, we thought, as we pulled up to the hostel.

The next day we explored 675,000 hectares of Kosciuszko National Park. I climbed mountains and I plundered through the snow but still there were no Swedes to be found.

So we turned the 4WD north and headed for sunnier climes. We zoomed past a horde of toothless hoons doing burn-outs in their Holden V8s, cans of beer and 12-inch mullets included. There were a bunch of retirees-cum-caravanners who were dolled up in their summer clothes. But still it was oh so quiet on the Swedish front.

At last we reached Sydney. It was in the inner-city suburb of Glebe when this hunt for Nordic babes turned into a… well, wrong wet dream. We stopped here because of its outstanding Bohemian features. Driving through I sensed it was one of those places notorious for its ballooning transvestite population. This was the NSW answer to Brighton in England. And it had a charming village ambience that seeped fast into the bloodstream of the three of us. Here the Glebe YHA was a must. The tenacious smell of fun that bubbled from its doors lured us in. There was a lounge, a TV room and an impressive amount of floral furnishing.

It was here though that transvestites equipped with $2 purple wigs ravaged me with renditions of “You can dance. You can jive. Having the time of your life! Ooooo…” I was right. There was a large transvestite population here. This was little consolation as the words crawled out of their bourbon breaths.

It soon dawned on me that:

  • Swedish girls are tough to find during the Aussie winter;
  • Most of them are probably indoors shooting those late night TV commercials; and
  • There was an old man standing outside the hostel staring at me as he fondled his navel.

O Swede love of mine

That was it. I hoisted the white flag and shed the tears. In an act of wild desperation I sent an SMS and in five seconds I had BABE 21 rolling about in her bed. As I put the video on loop, I flushed out songs that I made up on the spot.

“Now and then when I see her face she takes me to that special place, and if I’d stare too long I’d probably break down and cry! Oh oh oh oh Swede love of mine. Oh oh oh oh Swede love of mine.”

On our road home the Prado smelled atrocious. This came as no surprise as the combined BO of three men had been festering in there for days. A tip for travellers. Air out the car at the night, or at least have one car wash during the trip. Phew!

Send us a travel tale and if it’s published you’ll win a $300 Oz Experience voucher redeemable on Oz Experience Passes, ATA NT camping trips (www.adventuretours.com.au/). Email your tales (700 words max), with a picture of yourself, to travel@tntdownunder.com

While trying to drive across the Simpson Desert, LIZZIE JOYCE and her partner were forced to hitch a ride with some dodgy truckers.

Early one January morning my boyfriend Dan and I set off on our trip across three states, covering 3,000 miles on what would turn out to be the best trip I have ever done, not to mention the most dangerous. We were attempting to cross the Simpson Desert on our way to Alice Springs from Sydney. We were fully prepared and set off in our 4WD loaded with equipment, including 60 litres of water, a double swag, a laser beam,
and an Epirb signal.

After 10 hours of driving, watching the landscape turn from highways and tall buildings to red earth and eternal horizons we glided past an old mining town called Cobar, stopped for a wee and drove on through, thankful that this ‘Hicksville’ town was not our destination. But while driving at an average speed of 120km per hour, the trusty car (which I was assured had “just had a full service and was made for driving across such terrain”) was disintegrating and the entire wheel was about to fall off.

Ugly mothertruckers

Suddenly, the brakes started to fail and smoke started pouring out the front passenger tyre. We were 120km from the last town and with at least 100km to the next, Dan decided we should drive on (without brakes) and see if we could make it to our destination. Luckily it didn’t last long anyway as the car stopped in defiance and we were forced to pull off the road in the middle of nowhere. Within minutes two semi-trailers driving in convoy by brothers, pulled up to offer us help and I’ve never been so glad to see two spectacularly ugly truckers before in my life. Freaky Brother One then began to undress me, with his eyes, almost frothing at the mouth at coming in such close proximity to someone of the opposite sex, while Freaky Brother Two was pretending to be a mechanic and baffling Dan with his bullshit. It was turning into Wolf Creek.

Nothing could be done with the car, and we had no choice but to accept a lift from Freaky Brother One to the nearest roadhouse 13km up the road. But then he said there wouldn’t be enough room in the cab so Dan should travel with his brother and I should hop into his cab by myself. By this point I was close to hysteria and there was no way I would be getting in that lorry by myself.

So we both hopped in with Brother Number Two. Dan settled in the middle of the very spacious cab which had enough room to house a small Albanian family! Relieved to be on our way to a phone box and in relative safety, (even if we were in being driven by an axe wielding maniac I had enough faith that Dan could knock him out if it came to it) I thought it would be plain sailing from here. After a couple of minutes on the road Brother Number One starts becoming agitated – he thinks he has lost his keys as he can’t use the radio to contact his brother. He pulls into the side of the road and asks me to hop out to see if he had left them in the door lock. This forced me into ungraceful acrobatic maneuvers in order to hang myself out the door and reach round to grab the keys, with freaky brother one more than enjoying the view of my ass in the air. The keys were there, so off we set again in stilted silence.

Roadhouse blues

Finally we caught sight of the roadhouse and saw our escape was only minutes away and we made a sharp exit from the freaky brothers. Good riddance!

The roadhouse turned out to be a petrol pump and a shop that was about to close. They had a phone though and we arranged for a tow truck to pick us up and take us back to the nearest town… Cobar (the Hicksville town we drove through scorning) where we would have to wait for the next three days for the car to be repaired. How ironic that the town we were laughing at turned out to be our refuge.

So we skipped the Simpson Desert and took another route to Alice Springs where we arrived two weeks later with the biggest smiles and the best memories!

Send us a travel tale (preferably about Oz) and if it’s published you’ll win a $300 travel voucher redeemable on Oz Experience Passes and ATA NT camping trips (www.adventuretours.com.au). Email your tales (700 words max), with a picture of yourself, to travel@tntdownunder.com