I got up bright and early to leave Port Headland at about 4:00. Just as I was saddled up and ready to go I noticed my rear tyre was soft. After a month and 2500km without needing a pump up this was a bad thing. Turns out one of the patches I had put on was melted off. It was all sticky and air was leaking out. It does get hot in the sun, I’m not sure if I mentioned it already or not but a pack of hard jellies I had in my bag melted and turned into a brown gelatinous mess. This tyre drama doesn’t count as a puncture though, the tyre has not been penetrated yet.

Anyhow I proceeded onto the next water stop at Whim Creek. It was an old hotel but has recently been bought by a copper mining company and was getting a serious workover with lots of fancy new facilities. I’d only done 120km and thought about staying for the evening but the wind starting howling in the afternoon and it was a tailwind too. There was no way I was going to miss this so around three in the afternoon I left again. I was absolutely flying along, doing about 30km/h for 2 hours before it decided to do an about turn and smack me full on in the face. At this stage there was only 25km to Roebourne so I kept working away until I got to the town. I didn’t plan on a caravan park but I was told it had the only store still open when I got there so I went and got some milk and a site for the night. Some people were having a BBQ beside my tent and offered me some coral trout. Sea trout is my favourite fish back home but coral trout is very different. It’s white flesh and not pink/red but was delicious.

I stayed up chatting with one of the guys there. He is working for a mining company in Karratha, the money they can get up here is unbelievable. I suppose it’s understandable, you’d want to be paid well to live in this part of Australia but, even the supermarkets are offering $24 per hour to stock shelves. That said everything is priced accordingly too. A sausage roll in Port Headland cost $6, it’s $3 at most roadhouses and they are expensive by comparison to the major towns. If I wasn’t keen to get to Melbourne for the Grand Prix I’d probably have stayed a few weeks here to try and fatten my bank balance. Who knows I may be back when the ride is over I still have to pay for a flight home.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 7:57 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.