Long empty road

I left Kununurra at dawn. About 50km out there was a fork in the road, south heading for the Turkey Creek roadhouse at the Warmun Aboriginal community or north to Wyndham. Going north would be just an up and down trip. I’d been reliably informed that there was not much to see apart from the five river lookout which is good. Not really much of a decision, a pretty lookout just not being enough to add 120km to my journey. Honestly I want to get through here as fast as I can.

The road down to Turkey Creek is beautiful, it is nothing like you see in Europe. The sense of isolation out here is very real, although I’m riding along a major highway in Australia there are regular periods of hours with no traffic passing in any direction. Along the way there was another roadhouse which didn’t appear on my map. It was brand new which was a pleasant surprise. I got some cold drinks and pressed on. I picked up a booklet about traveling in W.A. and the N.T. It said that at Turkey Creek there was a backpacker style dorm with airconditioning. Now thats an incentive to do an extra few km in the evening.

On my way down there I came across a bushfire raging on both sides of the road. As the wind was in my face it wasn’t going to push off if I tried to wait it out. So I took a breather and then sprinted my way past it. I managed to get me and all my stuff moving at 55km/h which I think is pretty fast. As I was getting near the flames I was starting to think it was a bad idea, even 100m away the heat was unbelieveable and as I was passing the 3/4 metre flames I felt like my skin was melting. I should have taken some pictures, I’m sure it would have looked very dramatic but the only thing on my mind then was not getting burned

When I got to Turkey Creek there were no beds free. There is a big construction project going on and all the bed were taken by workers. So I got to sleep on the picnic table out front. It wasn’t too bad, the humidity is definitely lower here than Kununurra. I was awoken in the middle of the night by a group of wild horses passing through. It was a surreal sight, there were about 30 of them wander up along the road. What do you call a group of horses, a herd?

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 4:43 pm by Ross and is filed under Australia, Western Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.