Day 53 | Near Pindaring Rocks: out on the Carnarvon Mullewa Road, ie, starting to get remote

79 km | zzOz total: 2,693 km

Mullewa was more or less as expected.

Boarded up shops, even the open one, no public power outlets to be seen, a 3 legged dog hopping along the main street without a leash, white spongy bread available, fresh not frozen, but no muesli. Suddenly my favourite biscuit has gone from less than $2 to $3.

Mullewa’s just on 100 km from the 30k people in Geraldton and the town suffers.

Sensing this I’d bought up big in Morawa a couple of days ago, 12 days of food aboard. Mullewa had water in abundance so I filled up my water bottles, 7.5 litres, and headed off north.

2 surprises.

Firstly, despite the benign weather forecast it rained off and on until about 2 30 pm. Getting sick of that.

Second, the road was sealed for about 50 km, that wasn’t shown on the map, but I had to share with a roadtrain, ie, 4 trailers filled with iron ore, or not, about once every 10 minutes, but only until the seal ran out, or to be more precise, until it went into the mine site.

I was trying to think about how to describe this road. It’s wide, a few avoidable corrugations now and then. Sort of like the Gibb River Road.

There’s no farming activity around, Mullewa was the termination of the wheat fields.

There’s now long distances between the dots on the map: Murchison is 150 km according to the first sign on the gravel road. There’s a lack of traffic now the mining trucks have turned off.

Hope the road continues as well, but really, it’s time to switch off the bad weather.

I’m just about over it.