Glancing over my shoulder, the large, sweaty man was closing the gap.

We were rounding the path on the lip of the Henbury Meteorite Craters in the crushing heat and we could feel his heavy breath on our necks. It seemed a rather isolated spot - 140 km south of Alice Springs and 15 km up a red earth road from the Stuart Highway - to be nabbed from behind by a bare-chested Russian wrestler.

Then he was on us as we reached the car park and honesty box for the gravel campsite where his vast Governator Hummer dwarfed our hobbit-like Corrola.

'Do you have change for a $10?' - Slavic but encased in a light veneer of broad Aussie. 'No worries mate.' I forked over two fives and retreated to our rocky campsite while 'The Bear' unfolded his Hummer-top tent, wheeled a quad bike from his trailer and zoomed off down the road, shirtless, long hair streaming behind.

It seems Russian oligarchs have spread beyond Chelsea.

Later, as the sun set into the desert and Venus shone in the west, The Bear stopped work on his quad bike and appeared at our campsite with a stool and two bottles of chilled New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc courtesy of the fridge in his Hummer. As The Bear hydrated with a bottle of white over ice we learned that he was Polish, not Russian, and a doctor not a wrestler, who hailed from Sydney where he'd emigrated to from Poland in the late 1980s. He'd recently sold a large medical practice and had driven up to Alice Springs [$2000 in petrol for his Hummer] on an Australian national Medicare contract to provide medical service to isolated Aboriginal communities. Clearly a man of the people.

We offered him dinner but he waved it off - 'I ate sushi for lunch' - and he quaffed a second bottle of white.

For fun he was racing in the Finke Desert Rally on his quad bike - 500 km of sand dunes in one day - and between diagnosing diabetes and sewing up wounds 1000 km from nowhere his other passion was poker and his greatest joy, empty the bulging pockets of payday miners on the lash in the Alice Spring Casino.

Perhaps a Bear after all.