We awoke on the morning of day 2 in a freezing swamp and wondered if sleeping in a swag in the middle of a racetrack in central NSW during winter is really for us.

Each day we are adding something to our list of basic things not to do. This morning it was don’t leave your shoes outside when you’re sleeping in a freezing swamp during winter.

We pulled on wet, crispy boots and went, shivering, to breakfast and the morning briefing. It turns out the whispers about the Astra are true; not only did it tragically pass away yesterday, the owners seemed to have locked the doors and disappeared, taking the keys with them. How this was achieved without a car in the middle of the NSW desert I am not sure. What I am sure of is that such behaviour is frowned upon by shitbox organisers. The drivers of the Astra, whose identities remain unknown to us, were the subject of quite some derision. It seemed that somebody was going to salvage their wheels however, which was a silver lining.

We also learned during this briefing that recent rains in central Australia meant that one of our key unsealed roads was unsafe to drive upon, which meant a two day diversion from our original itinerary; because, in central Australia, a washed-out road takes two days to drive around.

So we returned to our makeshift camp and tried to forcefully squeeze our enormous, not-at-all-shrink-wrapped mattresses into the back seat of our car. We eventually managed this, although the situation as it stands is untenable.

We then turned our attention to the dress-up theme of the day; ‘punk’, for which we were very unprepared. We have been about 22 hours behind schedule ever since our Carnival incident, and so our window to procure punk outfits in Melbourne had evaporated. We had some costume elements of Voldemort, white face paint, flamboyant renaissance painter, medieval peasant belts and a lavish, faux-velvet Dracula jacket. We did our best but ended up far closer to ‘modern vampire’ than ‘punk’; very, what we do in the shadows – Fauce like one of the well dressed ones, and me more like the emaciated 1000 year old ghoul in the basement. These outfits did, however, provide nice juxtaposition to the red dirt and country pubs we toured throughout the day.

We covered about 550km today; Hay via Ivanhoe, Menindee and Broken Hill to the gorgeous remote town of Silverton; famous for camels and Mad Max. We saw wild roaming cattle, goats of all shapes and sizes, birds of all colours, a huge golden sunset, kangaroos and wild emus. My wild emu count at the start of today was zero, now it is 37. This was a real treat.

We spent most of today again on sealed roads, due to the aforementioned diversion, so the fabled ‘triage tent’ remained without many patrons. But one feels this might change tomorrow, with about a million kilometres to cover on the dirt.

Oh, also the shitbox rally attracts a rather handy, practical genre of human. I am not saying Fauce and I are not without our skills and talents, but we have been keeping a list of the many things we have seen going on around us that we don’t know how to do. I’ll start that list now:

• Open a beer without access to an implement specifically designed for this purpose;
• Roll up a swag into any reasonably sized package; and
• Get a ‘carby’ started with a small plastic cup of petrol that still had some red wine in the bottom.