NORDLYS - Start of our Land Tour

Start of our Land Tour

NORDLYS

David and Annette Ridout

Tue 15 Aug 2006 08:12

The Start of our 'Land Cruise of Australia'

Tom Price

13th August 2006

After a very irritating week plus in Fremantle we eventually started north on the morning of Tuesday 9th August. Everything had gone wrong. As I write we do not know where we can put Nordlys after mid November. Our special Australian mobile phone fell out of my pocket and broke the day before we left. The car needed a lot more doing than expected and then having been serviced sprung a diesel leak, etc etc. However with all this behind us we are now determined to enjoy life and we have already had some fantastic new experiences. The first of these being something that we all learnt at school but in our case we had not taken on board enough. Arid, land masses are very cold at night if one is far from the sea and there are no clouds! The night before last the temperature was down to 3C having been in the high twenties during the day. For two past middle aged softies who do not have special arctic sleeping bags this was a shock!

The people we meet are 'different'. A film could have been made of dinner our first night. With 660km under our wheels we elected to stay in an hotel in the one street town of Cue. We were offered dinner by our host. Eight of us turned up to sit at one table. Four contract miners, we were in gold mining country, provided monosyllabic conversation. The other two were an anthropologist and a young girl health inspector. They were there respectively, at tax payers expense, to see that the local Aborigines were being looked after and that the works canteens of the various mines were clean. They were both typical government employees. Well educated with numerous degrees and quite unrealistic about making a success in the cold world outside a government salary and pension. Conversation round this table was to say the least not in a natural flow. We sat between the two groups and did our best.

The next noteworthy experience occurred another five hundred or so km further north, this is a very big country, in the mining town of Newman. Here Whale Back Mountain has been turned into one of the biggest, if not the biggest, man made hole on planet earth. We did a mine tour and witnessed the enormity of the operation. 30,000 tonnes of high grade iron ore leaves this hole on every train to the coastal port of Port Headland. Four trains a day leave, every day of the year except Christmas Day. Each truck carries 240 tonnes of ore from the bottom of the mine to the processor. Often driven by girls these leviathans get through 100ltrs of diesel an hour and are made by Caterpillar of the USA. The drivers do 12 hour shifts with two breaks of half an hour. I did not like to ask if bladder size was a requirement of the job as just stopping by the roadside and hopping behind a bush was obviously not on. There are no bushes and every vehicle on the site is constantly monitored by satelite. Two day shifts followed by two night shifts then three days off. They live in the largely company town of Newman and earn $100,000 plus. All the statistics about this site are mind-boggling but seeing it in operation is very impressive. The whole is owned by BHP Biliton and is only one of half a dozen mines in the Pilbara area.

The original mountain was half as high again. In the next 22 years

the hole is due to go half again as deep and the left hand side

to go back one km. The dumper trucks seen here are 10 meters high

and are carrying 240 tonnes of ore

Then on to the National park of Karijini. Here we discovered that despite it being the height of the tourist season one of the two camp sites was closed for maintenance. We thus were restricted to the less desirable of the two. However we have walked into and along one of the famous gorges that this area is known for. Sort of mini Grand Canyons they are steep sided and about 100 plus meters deep. We would have loved to see more but we have a long way to go. This morning we climbed 400 meters to the top of Mount Nameless. The highest mountain in Western Australia at 750 meters. The whole of the Hamersly Range of mountains was spread before us. Starting at eight o'clock we did a mile through bush surrounded by a mass of wild flowers before we started the climb. At one stage this was litterally almost vertically upwards and was never less than thirty degrees up. It was a marvellous experience to get to what we thought was a crest and to find that infact it was the top and the further summit we had seen was in fact lower!

To date we have seen an Emu with his three chicks, yes the male of the species looks after the children. A Kangaroo has bounded out of the bush and narrowly missed us. Dingoes have wandered past our tent and howled eerily at night and we have been witness to the marvels of Australian bird life especially at dusk and dawn. Galahs, Corellas, Spinifex pigeons, 28 parrots (this is their name not the number we have seen), wedgetailed eagles feeding off road kill and the ever present Australian magpie larks are amongst the masses of birds to enliven our time here. The dawn and dust chorus they produce has to be heard to be believed.

Dale Gorge from on top

Annette scrambles along some 100 meters below the top

This evening we intend to take the car up the 4WD track that is the easy way up Mount Nameless in order to witness sunset over the ranges which we understand is a not to be missed site. This sort of touring is without doubt hard work and we realise how civilised and easy life on Nordlys is compared with camping out of one, admittedly large, vehicle. So far the experiences have outweighed the trials.