After the initial culture shock of returning to traffic, people, pollution, noise and rain – all of which totally threw me after such a long time in the desert – I set about selling my trusty travelling companion Oz, a sad moment indeed after all we'd been through together.
It turned out to be easier than expected. After obtaining a roadworthy certificate, which required about A$500-worth of mechanical work, I advertised in The Trading Post and settled back for the flood of calls. They never came. Five days after the advert appeared I'd received precisely no calls, so I rang up The Trading Post and changed the price for the next ad from the rather optimistic A$2000 I'd started with to a slightly more palatable A$1700. Five minutes later I had a call from an interested party, and that night I'd sold it, for the original asking price of A$2000; I cancelled the second ad straight away, before it even got published.
And how was this miracle possible? My buyer was a classic: she had just passed her test and her Dad had said he would buy her a car. His budget was A$2000, and he was happy to pay anything up to that amount as long as his daughter liked the car. Two things worked in my favour: they'd seen one other car that day and it had been terrible, and my stereo blew the young girl's mind. Ker-ching! It'd been a while since I'd seen a roll of cash that big...
