Smaller than a grain of rice!

Thursday morning, Pete and the Prado were down at the Newman Toyota dealership bright and early. Investigation of the problem was successful … a stone about the size of a grain of rice had lodged itself between the door handle and the spring mechanism preventing any movement of the door opening mechanism! Amazing that such a little stone could cause such an issue.

This issue really highlighted the tyranny of distance and how remote much of Australia can be when you leave the eastern seaboard. When this incident occurred we were 495km to Geraldton, 413 km to Kalgoorlie and 516kms to Newman. These were the closest Toyota dealerships ... we headed to Newman as that was the direction that we ultimately wanted to travel. Whoever said that there was a Toyota Dealership in every town!? But I can say that they are far more prevalent than any other dealership!

I had a very productive morning, three loads of washing washed and dried, a lot of it line dried, before 10am. It was a bit warm but not as hot as we were expecting (expecting 39 but we’ll take 28 degrees any day – the locals thought that it was cold – most people were wearing jeans and long sleeved shirts – not us!). We then headed to the supermarket for a restock; while having a white Toyota we fitted in quite well – but we did not have a red sand flag, high-vis shirt or steel cap boots and although we think the car looks dirty it was by far the cleanest vehicle around.

This morning, we left Newman and drove, without beeps to Karijini National Park…the silence was wonderful! The landscape on the drive over was beautiful. Thanks to the recent rains there are a lot of wildflowers, everything looks green and lush against the red, ore coloured soil.

The Pilbara has lots of very large mines and as we have continued our journey, we have become quite accustomed to seeing and needing to overtake large road trains, this morning’s road train was the best we have seen so far … seven iron ore hoppers … shudder to think what sort of fuel economy they get!

We have setup camp at Karijini, our location for the next three nights.  Within an hour of having completed our setup the heavens and opened and down it poured. We have been very fortunate with the rain; this is the first big downpour in the six weeks we have been on the road. Hopefully the rain will clear and we can start to explore a couple of the many gorges in the park.

We have now travelled just over 10,000kms, seen some amazing country, met some interesting locals and chatted with and received useful information from a few fellow travellers. We even received fresh whiting and squid from the couple next to us in Ceduna, caught that morning – needless to say it was delicious.

If you haven't already seen them - there are a heap of pix under the IMAGES menu item