…And on to Carnarvon…

With another long and hot ride in the offing, I left Port Hedland at 7.00am and tore south, hoping to get as much distance behind me as possible before the energy-sapping sun came out to play, and hopefully before too many traffic officers were out and about…

The Rio Tinto salt-works on the outskirts of Port Hedland... BHP Billiton seems to control most of the iron ore mining in the area to the north and east of the town...

The evening before, I had filled my fuel bottles, having learned that out here, fuel stations are often hundreds of kilometres apart, and I did not plan to stop too often on the way down to Carnarvon, 870 km away…

Road signs and Road Trains...!! Not much else to keep the mind occupied ...!!

But wait...!! Look...!! There's a small hill...!!

I was now used to the wide open vistas of Western Australia, and did not expect to see anything of interest for the next few hours… At one point however, I was however shaken from my semi-conscious state by a very large snake that crossed the road in front of me, forcing me to jink across the highway in order to miss it… Apart from that, and the small flocks of crows cleaning up the mess left by the Wallaby-Culling road trains, the long ribbon of highway remained empty for long periods of time…

After covering 220 km, Carnarvan was still a long way away...!! Signage displaying these vast distances can be a bit of a downer...!!

This sign made planning my next fuel stop a lot easier... I tried not to look at the bottom of the sign where the distance to Perth was printed...!!

The manager at the BP Service station in Roebourne, has a sense of humour...!!

I stopped in Roebourne to have a bite to eat, stood watching the people of this dry and dusty little mining town going about their daily business…

This had once been the biggest town between Darwin and Perth, but the gold rush days of the late 19th century were long gone, and the present population number a little over 1000 souls…

It is essentially an Aboriginal town, and serves as a fuel stop for passing highway traffic, as well as a gateway to a few national parks which lie to the east of the town…

This area is normally a heat scorched part of the west coast, but on the morning I stopped there, a cold wind was blowing, and I briefly considered putting a windbreaker on under my jacket… But only briefly, as I knew that the wind would not last, and later I’d be wishing that I had left the windbreaker off…!!

Further south, I noticed that in places, the red desert sands of the interior had marched their way over the highway, heading for the coast… A crew of workers were clearing a small section where the sand had covered the emergency lane of the highway, and they stopped to lean on their shovels as I zoomed past… I was probably the most interesting thing they would see all day…!!

In some places, the red desert sand had marched down to and across the highway...

I refueled at Fortesque River, and rode on towards Cane and Yannarie, two tiny settlements that straddled the highway…

About a hundred kilometres past Yannarie, I saw a sign that had me grabbing clutch and brakes, and after doubling back, I stopped to take a photo that showed I was crossing the Tropic of Capricorn… This imaginary line of latitude marks the most southerly point on the earth’s surface where the sun appears directly overhead… The Tropic of Capricorn passes through just 10 countries; four in South America, five in Southern Africa, including Madagascar, and of course, Australia…

This was the fourth time I had crossed the Tropic on Capricorn on the GBWT...!!

On this long and desolate stretch of highway, I managed to break a record that I had begun working on whilst riding the section of road between Kununurra and Broome a few days previously…

In order to stave off boredom, I had begun making extensive use of my throttle control, kindly donated by Willie when we rode together in Cyprus last year… I could now also take my right hand off the throttle and fiddle about without losing any speed…!!

With such a beautifully balanced bike under me, I could actually use both hands to do things like steady the camera, make notes in the little book I carry in my jacket pocket, fold my arms and sit back in a more relaxed position, play the drums on my tank bag in time with the music blasting through my I-Pod, and do a host of other things, without touching the handlebars…!!

Breaking my "Look Ma, no hands..." record...!! A mere 67 km without touching the handlebars...!!

I once overtook a road train while peeling a banana with both hands, and the look on the driver’s face as I breezed past him at 120 km/h, was priceless…!! He was traveling at about 110km/h himself, so it took a while to get all the way past him… As I drew level with his cab, I saw his eyebrows shoot up, and then he reached for his cell phone and began snapping photos of me as I drew away from him…!!

But back to the record I mentioned… I had begun taking notes of how far I could travel without touching the steering, and by the time I left Port Hedland, the longest distance I had achieved, was 42 km…!! On the road between Fortesque and Cane, I shattered that “record” by riding for a total of 67 km without once touching the handlebars…!!

I became quite adept at taking the long gentle corners by merely shifting my weight from one buttock to the other, and for the most part rode on the painted line running down the centre of the highway…

Passing trucks and caravans was a little tricky I must admit, as the turbulence created by them tended to pluck at the front wheel, causing a minor wobble or two…!! I had set the control at about 120 km/h, and this seemed to be the speed that most vehicles were traveling at, so overtaking was not much of a factor, except when I came up behind people looking for a place to stop and rest…

I stopped for fuel again at Minilya, and while I was filing up, a guy pulling a caravan rolled into the filling station… He walked over to where I was standing and greeted me warmly…

If I had to ride across so many miles of emptiness again, I am sure Dementia would have set in...!! Or perhaps it already has...!!

“G’day Mate…!! I wonder if you could settle a little argument the wife and I have been having for the past thirty kilometres…??”

“Only if it doesn’t involve any bloodshed…!!” I replied with a grin…

“No, no… It hasn’t come to that yet, but it might…!! See, the thing is, she says that when you overtook us on the road back there away’s, that you were holding a camera in one hand, and a bottle of water in the other…!! She swears blind that you had no hands on the bars…!! I told her that was impossible, because how would you be steering then, hey…!!”

“Well sir… I reckon you owe your wife an apology, because there’s very little wrong with her eyesight…!!”

He gaped back at me, looking from the bike and back to me a couple of times…

“Bloody hell, Mate…!! How’d ya do it…??”

And so began a long discussion about the Big Fella and many attributes that make him the best touring machine I had the good fortune to be riding on…!! His wife joined us after a while and we laughed about the argument they had been having… There were many “See…!! I told you so’s…!!” and a punch on the arm that sent the poor guy staggering…!!

Ten hours after setting out from Port Hedland, I arrived at the Fascine Lodge in Carnarvon... Well tuckered out...!!

We went inside the little store to pay for fuel, and as an afterthought, I decided to buy something to eat as well… I had covered 720 kilometres since setting out that morning, and I was a little hungry, see…!!

As I stood at the counter waiting my turn to be served, the guy who I had been chatting to about the boredom on Western Australian roads, came up and insisted on paying for the sandwich and energy drink I had placed on the counter…!!

“Sorry about the argument you lost, Mate…!!” I joked as we left the store…

“No bothers…!! I’ll win the next one…!!” he said with a laugh as he wished me well and left Minilya on his way to a camping spot somewhere on the coast…

Two hours later, I cruised into Carnarvon, a pretty little town on the northern edge of Shark Bay… The countryside had changed dramatically on the run in to town… Banana plantations were spread out on either side of the road, vast areas were planted with vegetables and flowers, the dry desert scrub-land I had been riding through for the past 1 500 kilometres a fast fading memory…!!

One of the things most notable in Australia, was the absence of litter…!! Just like all the other towns I had ridden through, hardly a scrap of paper or plastic was to be found on the streets of Carnarvon…

The first hotel I stopped at had no internet, and the barman thought that the only other place in town that did have, was the public library…!! He also gave me the impression that this was a place he rarely visited…!!

A patron propping up the far end of the bar had overheard my question, and suggested I try the “lodge across the way”, pointing vaguely in the direction of the bay across the road… I made my way to the Fascine Lodge, where the receptionist on duty went out of her way to ensure that I got a room as close to the offices as possible, so that I could pick up their wireless signal…

I decided to spend the following day there as well, to do some writing and rest up for the final 935 km ride down to Perth…The staff at the lodge ensured that I had everything I needed and were always happy to assist me with advice on what to do and see in the area…

“The sunsets out on Babbage Island are just gorgeous…!! You must go out to the jetty to see for yourself…!!” one had suggested…

Relic of a by-gone era... When men were men...and sheep were nervous...!!

The night-time temperatures here were a lot cooler than I had experienced up north, and by early evening, I was searching for my fleece lined jacket that I had very little use for over the last six months…!! Riding about in town wearing only a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, had me shivering by the time I got back to my room with my usual load of “supplies”…

Sunset over an old wagon on Babbage Island...

I discovered that one reason for the lower temperatures was as a result of the very heavy rain that had fallen in the area in December 2010, leaving large parts of the town under water, cut off from the northern and southern highways for weeks on end…

Entire homes were swept away by the floods and damage to the area was estimated at more than A$ 100 million…!!

Apparently, it had been the wettest season they had had for over a hundred years…!! The Gascoyne River that empties into the ocean at Carnarvon, rose over 15 metres above it’s banks, washing more than two thousand head of cattle into the sea…!!

Out in the countryside, where at this time of year the land was usually parched and dry, large bodies of water could still be seen, remnants of the extensive flooding that had occurred nine months previously…

The following evening, I rode out to Babbage Island, across a causeway that had been built to link the town with the deep water jetty, where once ships had been loaded with bales of wool and fresh produce… A outdoor railway museum stands near the parking area, from where tourists can stroll down the jetty that pokes out into the Indian Ocean almost a kilometre away…

The very old and the not so new...!!

I was going to give it a try, but as you know, I am still nursing a shoulder injury...!!

I ambled about through the remnants of what was once the shunting yard on the island… Rusting old carriages and the steam engines that used to pull them along the three kilometres of track from town to the jetty, stood mournfully on short stretches of rail…

Piles of other junk associated with their use lay scattered in heaps in between the engines… It seemed as if this had become a dumping ground for anything that was even remotely connected to the days when this must have been a bustling little port…

A large shed houses a small working steam-engine that still serves to take tourists out to the furthermost point on the jetty…

Most of the people I encountered there were preparing to walk out onto the jetty to watch the sun set… Like me, they had wandered through the “museum”, snapping away at the derelict equipment on show, all the while judging the best moment to turn their cameras and attention to the setting sun…

A bank of low cloud was scudding across bay as we made our way to the head of the jetty… The first few hundred metres of wooden posts and planking had been built through the tidal area where Mangroves and long spear-grass grew…

I was the only person wearing short pants amongst the group, and mindful of the sand flies that had plagued me up in Broome, where they bred in the Mangoves, I decided not to walk out onto the jetty, but remained on the shore to watch the sunset from there…!!

Despite a cold wind that blew, I stood transfixed by another beautiful sunset...

A blaze of bright orange as the sun sank lower made me marvel anew at the simple beauty of something most people never stop to look at… Despite the chilly evening, I felt a warm glow spread over me…

The sun sinks towards Madagascar, thousands of kilometres away to the west... In the foreground is the jetty that runs through the Mangroves and out to deeper water...

I thought of a few other sunsets that I had encountered on my journey, and figured that this one compared favourably with those that I might never forget… I sent a quick text message north to Bali, describing what I was seeing and wishing that “She who was Special” could be there to share it all with me…

Dusk settled over the land and sea as I prepared to head back into town...

The extraordinary colours that bounced around the sky had captivated the dozens of people who had witnessed it with me, and as they walked back to their cars, they kept turning back to look at the magnificent display as the sun sank below the horizon… The sunset seemed to have a “feel-good” impact on all those who had been privileged enough to see it that day…

Couples hugged each other; children walked hand in hand with their parents, smiling and laughing; and even the few dogs on their leashes seemed to be grinning…!!

The sky above Carnarvon had smiled down on us all…

©GBWT 2011