Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie are about 50 kilometres apart so why does our esteemed navigator take us over 600 kilometres from one to the other? The answer seems to lie in some rather skinny cast iron figures. Anthony Gormley (of Angel of the North fame if you’re in the UK) apparently took laser scans of over 50 local inhabitants from the nearby town of Menzies and planted the castings in the salt lake known as Lake Ballard. Now if I was one of those depicted, I’m not sure that I’d be too flattered, but you can make up your own mind!
Oh well, at least the sunset was something special
Kalgoorlie is famed for a hole in the ground, locally known as the Superpit. It certainly lives up to its name. A kilometre wide, close on 3 kilometres long and half a kilometre deep. Huge trucks, each hauling out 200 tons of ore operate 24/7, and that ore is processed to extract gold. Apparently a piece about the size of a golf ball is retrieved from about seven trucks of ore. It must be profitable judging by the number of trucks we saw working.
The buckets are pretty impressive too. Here’s one of the smaller variety.
Mike hit the throttle fairly quickly (in case Kim decided she wanted some gold jewellery!) and we rapidly made the 200kms to Norseman, a pleasant little town named after a prospector’s horse that kicked up a gold nugget in 1894. It also put us at the beginning of the Eyre Highway, otherwise more generally known as The Nullarbor, or colloquially ‘Nullarboring’. It’s 700 kilometres to the South Australian border, then another 470 kilometres to Ceduna where it technically ends, although there’s still another 400 kilometres to travel before we get to Port Lincoln at the southern promontory of the Eyre Peninsula.
The Nullarbor is one of those iconic Australian drives. It’s long and straight. In fact, part of it is the longest stretch of dead straight road in Australia.
It also boasts the world’s longest golf course. Each of the eighteen holes is located at a stop along the way. Special certificates are issued to those who complete the entire course. The journey should us three days. If we tried the golf, with our handicap it’d be Christmas before we competed the route! Instead, at the end of day one, we were able to camp overnight at the Wedgetail Roadhouse at Cocklebiddy. It’s not a large place!
The wind howled through the tree (I think there’s only one!) and so we took solace, and warmth, in the roadhouse, ate an enormous and very good dinner, drank a drop of perfectly acceptable Shiraz and slept like logs, despite the wind. The only other Land Rover we saw all day had broken down. The owner had bought it a couple of days earlier and was towing a large boat from Perth to Sydney, and having flown over to collect his purchases, had no spares and few tools with him. He was in a bit of a pickle. A wheel on the trailer was wrecked and so was the spare. On top of that, something was squealing with his vehicle. A mechanic told him that it was the viscous fan, and had that been true, we could have replaced it because we had a spare. However, the problem was a small bearing on the fan belt tensioner, a part that we did not have. He was hoping to find a truck with space to take everything to Sydney, or at least to a town with a repair shop, and had been waiting three days. We couldn’t do very much for him but did spend an pleasant few hours explaining to a first-timer some of the joys of Land Rover ownership.
Day two and we’ve completed 850 kilometres, ending up at the Nullarbor Roadhouse. The sun has gone, stars are gathering for their nightly display and the temperature is plummeting. So it’s out with the hot water bottle and an early night. Tomorrow we’ve some 350 kilometres to do before we reach the quarantine station at Ceduna where the vehicle will be checked for fresh fruit and vegetables. We could be on tinned rations for a couple of days.
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