Yesterday our cars finally "docked" at the Port of Melbourne. We hope to get them on Friday, September 14 (under the most optimistic scenario). And while they are going through customs clearance, we have a couple of days to spare. In the meantime, thanks to Subaru Russia, we have a chance to test drive the Subaru Outback 3.6.

Testing the Outback in the real Australian outback, after which the car model was named over twenty years ago – sounds logical, doesn't it?
Just for reference, the Outback is Australia's arid areas interspersed with shrubs and low trees.

We looked it up on the internet and found that an outback area closest to Melbourne was the Little Desert National Park, about 350 km north-west of the city.

We knew we'd be staying at a different hotel when we get back to Melbourne, so when the entire traveler4x4.ru team (four people) got in the car, it was already heavily loaded with our "hard-earned" road trip gear: five bulky bags and seven smaller ones + two huge hydraulic jacks bought the day before. This was around 550 kg of live load, some of it useful and some of it not as much.

It took us almost four hours to get to the park, which was 350 km away: Australia has strict speed limits and heavy fines. Exceeding the limit by a few kilometers will cost you 500 Australian dollars (25,000 Russian rubles). The speed limit on the Western Highway was 100/110 km, so we did not have a chance to test the Outback's six-cylinder horizontally opposed engine properly.

Besides, right-hand drive and left-hand traffic had been keeping us on our toes for two days already. Thanks God the Outback didn't have a stick shift!

So, after entering the park and nearly knocking over a couple of emus shamelessly violating traffic rules, and driving for about four more kilometers, we finally found ourselves on a rut road. At first sight, the rut wasn't very deep, at least as far as we could see it: no big deal for the cars that were waiting for us at the port. But the Subaru Outback is not the Toyota Land Cruiser 200.

We had no shovel, but only two jacks and eight hands, so we decided to give it a try. Gently, no fanatic zeal.
The first couple of kilometers went smoothly, with the permanent all-wheel drive confidently moving us through the sand and the electronics system preventing the wheels from spinning.
We couldn't even make a nice video of the car starting with its wheels spinning in the sand.

One of us suggested driving through the park and then heading south straight away to reach the ocean. But the rut was getting deeper, the motor humming louder and our speed dropping. Someone made a joke saying that the deeper you drive into an off-road area, the longer you'd have to walk to get a tractor; this was when our little Subaru got stuck in sand. After all, a 213 mm ground clearance is not bad, but it's not enough for a deeply rutted road.
However, I doubt that some other SUV than the Outback 3.6 had ever made more than 300 m here.

After three of us got out of the car – that is 300 kg less – we pushed it and freed it. Nevertheless, we decided we'd better head back, just to play it safe: we had neither a shovel nor the park ranger's phone number we could call to get a "tractor".

So we turned back and managed to leave the area without resorting to tractors. After driving 300 km south, we almost reached the ocean, nearing the Great Ocean Road we'll take tomorrow to come back to Melbourne and meet the rest of our team. To make this day even better, the customs might give us the green light so that we can start our journey on September 15.