Out of this world

MANILA, Philippines - Finally, a personal vacation. Some time off. It may be just two weeks in a year, but I treat them like dog weeks just to make them feel seven times longer than human time. I may have one of the coolest jobs in the world, but all the constant traveling, writing, deadlines, photo shoots, events, and conferences had started to take its toll and by the time I was ready to board the flight to Perth, I was as tired as a mood ring on a bipolar person.

It’s the Deakin annual summer holiday and it’s the one time of year that the whole family gets to go back to Australia to visit the grand folks. Ah...fourteen days of R&R; I could almost taste that good old Aussie beer going down the pipes as I pictured myself leaning back on a foldable deck chair in the backyard watching time go by while inhaling the faint smell of sizzling sausages on the barbie as it seasons the crisp autumn air with a delicate mixture of garlic and pork fat.

But the thing about being a traveling journalist is, you tend to do for work what most people do on holiday. Or so it seems. Either way, when you finally get to go on holiday with your own family, they look at you as some sort of an Olympic-level tour guide. Its probably no different to being related to a chef, I guess, and how you would tend to have unreasonably high expectations if they were to prepare you dinner. It just goes with the territory.

Actually, if I have any regrets about this job its only that I don’t get to share the incredible experiences with my family. And if I have to be completely honest, the more beautiful the place I visit, the deeper the guilt. So when the idea popped up about a road trip, I knew I was going to have to find something out of this world.

First up was the car. It had to be special; comfortable and practical, economical but still powerful, reliable yet good-looking, and spacious without being too ostentatious considering that it would need to be doing shopping mall and other suburban-type duties. It was extremely short notice, so naturally I thought of the most accommodating people I know. People who have built an entire brand on redefining customer service.

So I emailed Lexus.

The Singapore and Manila offices said yes even before they could confirm with their Australian counterparts. It was the same kind of reassurance that you get when you check into a 7 star hotel and nothing ever seems to be too much trouble. It’s the “we-will-get-it-for-you-or-die-trying” attitude that makes Lexus owners feel that they have bought so much more than a car. It’s a lifestyle.

Now getting a car in Perth, even on short notice, is not exactly difficult you may say – and certainly not enough reason to have these guys canonized in print – but when you consider that there was a massive hailstorm in the northern suburbs just a week or so before that wiped out thousands of cars, including just about every Lexus vehicle in the sales lot, I don’t know... call me old fashioned, but I think it deserves a special mention.

We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage here. Houses, cars, boats, shopping centers… it was like their version of Ondoy, with the car dealerships being in the geographical equivalent of Provident villages in Marikina. They had every excuse in the world to not come through. Yet they did.

Amazingly, they had an RX350 that had been spared from the storm. It happened to be the personal demo unit of David Jeary, the dealer principal of the war-torn Scarborough Beach Road Lexus dealership that took the brunt of the damage, and yet he was still willing to lend it to me for the entire two weeks that I was there. This is a guy that doesn’t know me from Adam, yet without so much as a Facebook friend request, he signed over the 275 horsepower, completely revamped, 2010 RX350 without question.

Now all we needed was a destination to equal the journey.

We had done the wineries down south, like the picturesque Margaret River, so this time we headed North. Far North. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in a seaside village called Monkey Mia where the dolphins swim up to your feet, but that seemed unreasonably far to drive with 3 young kids who collectively don’t add up to twenty years old, so we looked for something in between.

Perth is a gorgeous city. I had my first serious job there, met my wife there and basically forged a large part of my personality there. But I have to say that it is pretty damn far from everything. You could place the entire Philippines in between it and the next capital city and still have room to spare.

Carol from Lexus of Perth recommended the Pinnacles, which is a national park about 400 kilometers north of Perth that has unexplained limestone formations in the middle of the desert. I had heard about this place and probably have a fridge magnet somewhere, but it’s not exactly central to anything in the southern hemisphere. But what the hell, Lexus had been pretty reliable up until now, the least I could do was return the favor.

The drive going up takes about half a day and is mile upon mile of straight single lane roads that end up having a hypnotic effect. We’re restricted to the national maximum speed limit of 110 km/h, so I flick on the adaptive cruise control to 117km/h. Aussie cops may take a zero tolerance approach to speeding, but most speedometers are calibrated with a conservative margin of error of roughly seven percent. And believe me, when you do as much long distance driving as I do, every. Little. Bit. Counts.

It’s a good idea to check yours for accuracy, because if you consider that over a driving distance of 10 hours, say, you end up roughly 70 kilometers further than you would have been had you nailed the cruise control down to 110 km/h; its a little OC, I know, but there’s not a whole lot else to do out on those lonely country roads than to think up these things. Besides, there’s only so much “I spy” a grown man can take.

The RX model has always been an extremely comfortable vehicle, and this completely revamped version I’m driving with the 18 inch rims and a slighter wider stance, gives it an even more sure footed feeling as it glides across the endless Aussie highways. It’s up more than 400 pounds compared to the previous model, but it feels more athletic thanks to sharpened steering and a reworked suspension. A new double-wishbone rear suspension setup not only improves handling, but because of its more compact design, it also provides a little more cargo space behind the seats.

There are bigger brakes, ten airbags and a new six-speed transmission that swaps cogs smoother than a Barry White tune on the sensational Mark Levinson sound system. I’ve been given the premium package that includes a keyless ignition system, upgraded leather seating, a sunroof, a power rear liftgate, driver seat memory settings, an auto-dimming rearview mirror, and a new mouse-like multifunction controller for the hard-drive-based navigation system with real-time traffic, a back-up camera, Bluetooth and upgraded speakers.

It may seem a bit overkill, but after around eight hours or so of driving, its stuff like that that helps you climb out of the car in just as good shape as when you hopped in.

It’s only around 250 kilometers from Perth, but with all the lunch stops, toilet breaks, and oh-my-God-I-saw-a-kangaroo-can-we-pull-over-and-pat-him breaks, we rock up to Nambung National Park, which is just outside the town of Cervantes, a little after 3pm.

None of us are entirely sure what to expect. We have seen pictures before, but you could say the same about the moon. I don’t want to hype it up too much, but I can tell you that nothing will prepare you for what you’re about to see. The pictures can only capture so much, and something as incredible as this cannot be appreciated in anything less than real-life 3D.

There are theories as to how these rock formations happened, but none are concrete. And that’s the beauty of it. Nobody really knows. You are allowed to drive through the park, which if memory serves me right is about a five kilometer loop, and can stop as frequently as you like – which I do highly recommend. It feels like a combination of a dry ocean floor and how you would imagine one of Saturn’s moons to look like. It is eerie, and beautiful at the same time with the only familiar elements being the sand and the sky; everything else is just completely alien. Or out of this world.