Day 6 - Doing the Tanami track to Broome.
What happened to day 5?? Aah yes; we had an issue. I keep saying that the gods laugh at the best laid plans of mice and men. When I got up on day 5, I could not unlock the driver’s door on my Patrol. I also found that the rear door on the same side did not open either. I had to get in from the passenger side to shuffle to the driver seat to start up my car. Needless to say, I could not do thousands of kilometers like that.
I did some serious begging with the local Nissan dealer to get my 4WD booked in for a service that day. It turned out that an overload of dust had stopped the locking mechanism from working. After a good clean and some oil the doors were as good as gold once more.
So I left early on day 6 to head north of Alice on the Stuart highway to head for the Tanami track. 20 kilometers north of Alice I reached the turn off heading northwest through the Tanami desert towards Broome. This is the shortest road to Broome from the southeast of the country.
The Tanami track is just around 1100 kilometers long and is mostly unsealed and in average to poor condition of corrugation. The distance from Alice to Broome is just shy of 2000 kilometers. The track has been improving over the years because of the mining development along this area. As a result the road looks like a ‘W’ with a raised middle section bordered by a culvert on both sides that catches the water if and when it rains. That water is then diverted at drainage points. If it is wet and you end up in the mud in a culvert it is game over. You are not going anywhere in a hurry.
The tricky bit is that the trucks that carry the ore from the mines come in the shape of road trains with 3 or 4 trailers. The total thing is over 100 tons on the move and it is not able to move off the center of the road as the gradient would cause the train to roll over. So one plays chicken with the road train and eventually you get the message to pull off the road and wait for the monster to pass. These trains kick up so much bulldust that you are not able to move until the dust has settled a few minutes later.
The corrugations at times are so bad that you are not able to drive faster than 50 kilometers an hour. Once again the scenery along the road is stunning with many trees, grassy flat areas and dry countryside in other places. You are travelling through the Tanami desert. However the land does not look like a typical desert. There is a good deal of vegetation around. The other thing one notices is that there are very many, very large termite hills all over the place. I love their color which is a rich ochre and looks grand in the setting sun. The backdrop to the landscape is one of long hills and mountain ranges. Once again this is not a flat country.
By now the sun was getting lower and I had done less than 500 kilometers. The road conditions made it impossible to travel at any decent speed. In looking for an ideal camping spot I had noticed during the day that at every 50 kilometers along the track there was a microwave repeater station/mast. The spots were some 50 meters away from the road and had a cleared area around the masts. There was evidence of fires where travelers have used these spots for overnighting. This seemed like a gift to me and I pulled over at one of them and set up camp for the evening. I put down my swag at the rear of the car and set up the requirements like table, chair, gas for cooking and collected some fire wood.
A good meal and a beer later I turned in for the night and went to sleep. A while later, it must have been around 1:00am, I was woken up by the strangest noise: grrrcunch, grrcrunch, silence, then again grrcrunch. I gently lifted my head without making any noise and saw a dingo in the moonlight, not 30 meters away from me eating a small animal that he had caught and killed. As I lifted my head my sleeping bag made a slight noise which caused the dingo to look at me and disappeared amongst the grasses. I went back to sleep until daybreak.