Gibb River Blog #5

Mini Blog

Correction: We are headed to Albany not Albury. Bloody auto-correct. I seem to spend half of my life correcting auto-correct. I know I should be better at editing my posts, I’ll try to be better at it. Usually it is a relief for me to actually send it off then 10 minutes later Jackie pipes up with “you stuffed that up”. 

I might look into some recipes for mushroom baked beans, I’ll cook lunch tomorrow.

Thank you to Franco (my doctor) for this encouragement.

Here is a map of where we are and the next few stops. You’ll notice that we are skipping the West coast and this is because we’ve already done it (it is spectacular) but we’re interested in doing the ‘dodgy’ interior. Apparently it isn’t really friendly to tourists and you can read into that whatever you reckon and you’d probably be right. We have travelled this type of country quite a lot and we’re prepared for whatever it has to deliver to us.

 Gibb River #4,

The blog list keeps growing with now 44 readers not only from Australia but the UK, Norway and Canada too.

Jackie and I are now in Esperance Western Australia, this has long been on our list to revisit as 11 years ago we absolutely loved it but because of lousy inclement weather cut our stay short. So today this lovely town on WA’s South coast greeted us with heavy rainfall and high winds and this is predicted to stay with us for another 4 days. Not to be beaten we have already booked an additional 2 nights to bring our stop here to 6 nights. We went for a sodden drive to Cape LeGrand but really it was raining that hard we could hardly see a bloody thing.

This area of OZ is renowned for its bright white sandy beaches and crystal clear turquoise waters and even though it was cloudy, rainy and miserable here is a sample of what Hell Fire Bay beach is like.

Cloudy, rainy and pretty cold and it still looks like this. This is the coldest we’ve been so far on this trip, today was 13°C, most of the trip has been about 17°-24° so that’s like a heat wave to my cold climate cousins but cool here for us. It’s not quite winter yet and the Outback can get pretty cold at night so we are prepared for chilly temperatures.

Before you ask, no Photoshop tricks have been made on these photos, just a little cropping and contrast adjustment. 

Until I get some more photos (and the birds come out of their hiding places) I’ll post some others that I have taken on this trip.

The ‘humble’ galah.

‘Black boys, grass trees. There’s heaps of them here that in the Eastern states you would pay a fortune for.

Esperance beaches are incredible. These photos are taken in cloudy, rainy and windy weather, the sea is unsettled due to the off-shore winds.

Of course it’s not only humans that love these beaches, the great white sharks do too, 4 deaths in the last 5 years, the last one in March this year.

Tomorrow is Wednesday 18th May so we will have been on the road for 3 weeks, covered 5,700 kilometres and spent 6 days in beautiful Esperance. This is truly one of our favourite towns in Australia even though it has rained and been quite windy for most of the time. The town is clean, neat and just the right size. It’s slightly smaller in population than Ulladulla (12,000 people vs 16,000) and that suits me just fine.

We need to keep rolling and heading west so tomorrow morning we hitch up the van and depart the magnificent, pristine, blood & gore soaked beaches and heading to Bremer Bay on our way to Albury. We’ll spend 2 nights in BB, do some washing and checkout the scenery.

I had a few problems with the drone today and had had plans to do another one of my panoramas of the Esperance area but let me tell you from experience, I do not fly the drone unless the drone is fully calibrated and the conditions are close to ideal, at least not off cliff tops or in dodgy weather. It’s OK, there’s plenty of this coastline to explore yet and the drone is now in perfect condition (so it tells me).

I hope you’ve enjoyed the Esperance area as much as Jack and I have, we’ve waited 11 years to revisit it and have not been disappointed. I’m not crossing this off my list to come back to despite the crappy weather and long distance from anywhere.

Have a look at some last photos from here and then we’ll move on.

The strangely-named Hell Fire Bay. A bit rough today but no signs of Great Whites.

Lucky Bay, I think. It’s beautiful but the recent storms dumped heaps of seaweed around. Imagine it here if the sun was shining…

How annoying, I’m travelling with my new (very expensive) camera (and a few others) and I take this shot with my iPhone. 

Mum and baby feeding in the parking lot of Lucky bay delighted some tourists from the UK and France. 

New Holland Honey Eater. 

Whistling Rock at Cape Le Grande. Has the unusual ability to whistle with the wind and if you stand in the right place it catches the sound of the sea and amplifies it. Sounds like a jet aircraft.

Why does Jackie always look like she is just tolerating me?

The seas were pretty rough due to the storms lately.

Australian Pied Oyster Catcher. I did manage to get some photos of the Australian Ringneck or ‘28’ but they didn’t turn out any good. Later,,,

After about an hour trying to calibrate the IMU & the compass on the drone, I decided to finally read the instructions and it was all over in about 30 seconds. I had depleted the main battery by then and decided to just take a snap of Jack and I to prove that we hadn’t murdered each other and leave the better drone shots for later. 

 Welcome to our blog post #3. Feel free to leave a comment or just to say Gidday as there have been a couple of issues with people not receiving it. I think the problem is that the emails go into a spam folder or junk and truth be known they probably deserve to live there anyway. If you respond then at least I know who gets it or not.

Overnight stop at Penong, I had a quick few beers at the pub and here is a shot of the local windmill museum. Some large trucking rigs pull in here for fuel as did we. This will be the last of the ‘cheap’ fuel until we get into some more urban areas in Western Australia. 

Diesel here is $1.79/litre. If we go just a few Kms down the road it is $2.80/litre and when we are filling up 150 litres the difference gets a bit expensive. After a pretty uneventful drive of about 650Kms we ended up at a stop in Madura.

To the non-Aussies reading, the Nullabor Plain drive is an iconic trip across a huge flat, featureless plain. There’s no trees just low scrub. For the Canadians and Norwegians reading think of it like tundra,,, in reverse. Dry, hot, hard ground incredibly flat. The road is good nowadays being tarmac and it follows the incredible cliffs of the Great Australian Bight. Well worth stopping to view the multitudes of whales that congregate there to calve and frolic. We didn’t stop this time but have seen it all on previous trips.

Keen-eyed readers of my previous blogs may recognise these last photos and yes, you caught me being lazy, too lazy to stop the car and get the drone out again.

COMPETITION TIME - KIDS ONLY

This is a video that we took from the Penong Hotel. It’s a video of a Road Train. This is the maximum length here in Australia (on public roads - they do get longer on the stations) at 53.5 metres long. See if you can count how many wheels it has. Ask Mum or Dad to help you if want. To anyone who gets it right I’ll send you a postcard from Western Australia. No cheating, kids only, even you Rory! Answer is at the end of this post.

I’d like more questions from the kids. I had some good ones from Luke and Benji about caravan weights and I’m looking forward to answering more. Here’s a question for you, which is faster, a kangaroo or an emu? My guess is a kangaroo.

Thore marks on the sign aren’t bullet holes (well… some are) but they mostly are stickers from everywhere around the world.

Some gnomes have infiltrated this road stop.

Here’s a triple trailer road train filling up at the Penong Service Station.

The Comet Cafe at Penong, South Australia. S.A. is a greenie’s dream state, they dynamited the last real power station there a few years ago and decided wind and solar power was the way to go. The result was that they promptly plunged the state into darkness - during a major cricket final at the Adelaide Oval. They now import electricity from Victoria and now any business that has stayed in the state and wants to survive with any consistency has their own source of power and have installed diesel generators. Can you believe it?

Meanwhile the rest of the South Australia is plastered with thousands of wind and solar farms. As far as eye can see. 99 in this particular ‘farm’.

Yesterday we rolled into Kalgoorlie after a marathon 10 hour, 750 Km drive with ZZ Top blasting through the stereo and me hopped up on Jelly Beans and Mentos. I’m pretty used to long drives but that was a good one. My new glasses seem to have given me a new lease of driving life as I am not getting fatigued as much as I was getting lately. We’ve travelled about 4,600 kilometres so far this trip and now it’s time to slow down a bit. 3 or 4 nights here then we’re off to Esperance for a week I’d reckon.

No, Jackie doesn’t do any driving when we’re towing. I’ve made sure that she could if we really HAD to but it’s always me that does the driving. Jackie’s job is to choose the podcasts, peel the mandarins and hand me the Mentos. Speaking of podcasts she mainly picks the murder mystery or True Crime ones and seems to take particular notice to the mushroom-themed episodes, even to the point of writing down the recipes. What’s going on there?

We’ve seen lots of beautiful birds but unfortunately I’ve been doing so much driving that I haven’t had the chance to get any photos, that should change now so I will be posting them soon I hope. We’ve seen plenty of red-rumps, Australian ringnecks and superb parrots. Just beautiful. Lots of wedge-tailed eagles and emus too.

Kalgoorlie is an amazing place. In the middle of WA and home of the MASSIVE Super Pit. Jack and I are booked into a tour of the mine tomorrow and I can’t wait. This was the main reason that I had for coming back here. Jackie’s promised mushroom pie for dinner, huh?

(Answer to the kid’s quiz - 94 wheels and a kangaroo easily beats an emu in a race).

THE SUPER PIT

Jackie and I had seen the Superpit about 10 years ago and I was busting to see it again. It’s double the size now of course. One of the biggest gold mines in the world. I’m going to throw some numbers at you now.

3,500 kms of roads beneath Kalgoorlie.

The dump trucks are worth nearly $5 million each. V16s with 4 turbochargers. Drink 180 litres/hour, about $8 million in their life and about $6 million in tyres. The mining company has just bought another 40 of them.

The front end loaders cost $18 million each and they’ve ordered another 15 I think

I’ve forgotten the other numbers but they are impressive. I do like the stories about how the miners used to dig their tunnels beneath the pubs and at lunchtimes they used to come up via ladders into the pub for lunch and a few beers before going back down to work. Some of the pubs still have the tunnels there covered by Perspex viewing panels.

If you’ve never been here then I highly recommend it. This is what I wanted to show you and the boys Mark. I’ve used a super-long lens here on some of the photos so there is a lot of dust and heat haze in there.

Look at the difference in size to a normal truck.

The Superpit is over 5 kilometres long

There’s $10 million parked in the garage for repairs.

These might give you a better idea of the size. The dump trucks are limited to 40 Kph going down the hill and 10 Kph going up.