I mean, you must have had a compass or something.

Yes, I did, yes.

I had a compass and, you know, because... you just basically had to head east and not miss any checkpoints.

But the whole concept of the race, the organisers had planned it fairly well, but there were a few unexpected events.

And the first one was that just about everyone in the race got Shigella dysentery after we left Alice Springs.

We'd left from Ayers Rock or Uluru, as it's called now.

the first week went okay but the second week we all got started to get sick with shigella dysentery and the flies were so terrible out there in the northern territory that they were just literally carrying the bacteria from person to person and you know it's bad enough getting shigella if you if you can stay home in bed but when you're trying to ride a camel or lead a camel, which was what I was doing a lot, leading and running beside the camel.

So how did you get around that?

That must have been a pretty worrying experience.

Yes.

Yes.

you know, when you do something like this, you, in your mind, you have contingency plans and you think about what if, what if that.

And it was really something I never expected in the circumstances.

We were in the top part of the Simpson Desert and there are huge sand dunes.

And we'd fallen right behind because Tiki just kept sitting down and he wouldn't get up.

What was that moment like? Oh, that was just incredible.

It didn't start out that way at least.

No, it certainly didn't.

I had no intentions of racing or being competitive.

I just wanted to see some more of Australia.

And the camel, I didn't have access to a camel, so I hired one who's recently been caught out in the Great Stony Desert.

And he had very little contact with humans, obviously, until they caught him.

And he took an instant dislike to me, which wasn't a very good start to this.

Okay.