To Marble Bar

Tuesday 20^th May 2008

Paul was all chipper this morning since we’d be moving to semi-civilisation today – that was until we had a fight with the camper trailer to get it closed and ended up with me standing on the roof while Paul applied all his weight to pulling it down. We decided it was because it is slightly bent after the howling gales of the Cape Range but I don’t think we can do much about it. We also taped up the back of the trailer with masking tape to see if we can stop some of the insidious red dust from finding its way into every nook and cranny inside!

We took the Great Northern Highway for a while and were very impressed with the massive, four trailer road trains – how big are they?!! We stopped at the Auski roadhouse for an early lunch because there wasn’t going to be anywhere else and our meagre supplies didn’t stretch to anything substantial enough to count as lunch.

The turn off to Marble Bar was actually signposted (none of the other side-roads had been) but that wasn’t necessary anyway because my superior map-reading skills had us pinpointed down to the last 500m – I think! Actually – it wouldn’t have mattered how good they were because about fifteen minutes down the track it was all changed anyway with the appearance from nowhere (according to my map) of a new train line down to Fortescue mine which we were forced to dog-leg around.

This drive was one of my favourites so far – it wound through hills of light sandstone and provided Paul with some interesting challenges. We only met one other vehicle on the whole 2.5 hour trip. The road conditions varied considerably – sometimes red gravel, sometimes white gravel and other times grey sand, sometimes very smooth and other bits where slowing right down was imperative. In one particular place there was a very sudden dip (yes, through a floodway, of which there were loads and loads and loads) which left us all wondering if anything would still be in place inside the camper trailer! Speaking to some other visitors in the pub later, as they passed that dip there was a low-loader trying to reload the bobcat that had jumped off its trailer, so we weren’t the only ones to suffer.

We saw a couple of interesting hills – see what you make of them...

The caravan park was not exactly large but we had a pleasant grassy spot with a bit of shade and only two other sites in the park were occupied so it wasn’t going to be a noisy night! As we all hit the showers to try and shift the orange (unsuccessfully) we saw a big red kangaroo hopping around in the park. The tape had made a big difference to the amount of dust so clean up was pretty quick and easy – yay!

We decided to treat ourselves to dinner at the Iron-Clad Hotel – one of two drinking establishments in this one-horse town. It wasn’t what you’d call busy – two other sets of tourists and a couple of locals – but it was very friendly – everyone was talking to each other across the room, sharing in conversations and the landlady kindly sold us some ice-creams from her own personal store. They had no beers on tap – just cans and bottles – but Paul was delighted to find some cider to wet his whistle.

As anticipated, the caravan park was in silence when we returned at 8:30.