Here I was in eastern WA, if you get my drift. Kalgoorlie is a sizable town – say 40,000 people. Every single one of these people seemed to wear hi viz – even the mums and the kids. Everyone is involved in mining. In fact, the whole place is a mine – with a town kind of built in amongst the pits and the cranes.
No photos… Sorry. But for me this was a rest and relaxation stop. I was learning to manage my fatigue levels. After the big Nullarbor drive, I needed to spend a day or so in a hotel room. Just sleeping and not doing much. One of the reasons I am so behind with these blogs is because, driving as far as I have, I am smashed afterwards. Sometimes for a couple of days.
So, after a couple of rest days, I headed out of Kalgoorlie – an easy drive 3-4 hour highway drive to a place called Northam which is an hour from Perth. Easy as. That was until I reached the police road block. A truck carrying chemicals had rolled on the highway – the road was closed for 24 hours, at least. So, what to do…? Head south to Norseman and take the dirt road through to Northam, 550-600km, 9-10 hours – tough, tough dirt road driving. But these are the challenges I’m going to get driving to London, right? Suck it up and get rolling.
This may be a poor attempt to showing you what I drove on for 8-9 hours… But I thought I’d try.
I knocked it off, more or less without stopping. Ten hours straight. Not even a fuel break. Maybe a pee stop for a minute. I was on a mining road, so every 10-15 min a huge road train would crash by, in the other direction. I had to pass a couple – these guys are like 60m long. But what did my head in were the smaller mining vehicles – Hilux’s. I come from the school that, on a dirt road when someone is coming towards you, you ease your speed down to minimise stones flying up. Not in WA it seems.
I did pass one guy going the other way – maybe has was doing 120km. A huge cloud dust and stones followed him. I heard a really big bang – something had hit me, the truck. Everything looked and felt ok… I kept on going. It wasn’t until 2-3 days later…. I opened that little hatch inside the car to the sunroof. I was showered in glass. Somehow a stone had deflected onto the sunroof and shattered it. What a pisser!! Sun roofs are bloody expensive.
You know how sometimes you get a knock on your windscreen and the crack slowly spreads over a week or so? Turns out that same incident also took out my windscreen, that I needed to replace in Darwin.
I had a tense couple of hours – dirt roads at dusk and into the night. A favourite time for kangaroos. But I was lucky – not jumped out for me to hit. I arrived into Northam, smashed but a little proud. The beer tasted great, as did the pork ribs.