Saturday 26th June - Marble Bar Road to Great Northern Highway (Stanley Rest Stop)

The Great Northern Highway may be nice, smooth tarmac, but boy, is it boring.  After two days of cross country driving through some beautiful scenery on fairly decent gravel roads,

we returned to the black top near Eighty Mile Beach, having passed 140000 miles on the odometer.

The Land Rover decided to celebrate this milestone by giving us a scare this morning as the battery light remained on after starting due to the alternator not charging the batteries.  However, after cleaning the connections and applying a liberal dose of WD40 we eventually coaxed it back to life and didn’t have to resort to fitting the spare.  It’s probably all bunged up with dust, we’ll have to check it out properly when we reach Broome.

We covered 450km today, and we must be starting to get used to the distances as it didn’t seem that much.  The journey was broken up by a couple of stops en-route, the first at Marble Bar SPOT

to see what is actually jasper, the colours of which are really bought out when wetted,

followed by a detour to the lovely Coppin Gap (recommended by Heini).

At both locations we chatted to so called “grey nomads”, retired Australians touring the country with caravans behind their 4WDs.  Everyone seems up for a bit of a chat and are always interested in our vehicle and what we’re doing.  For some reason we stand out as being foreign.

For those interested in the road kill situation, it’s mostly dead cows at the moment (which you can generally smell some distance off).  Although I’m not sure all are victims of cars, it’s a hard life being a cow out here and I’m sure some just succumb to the harsh conditions.

We tried to find the remains of the abandoned mining town Shady Gap which was about 60km south of the turn onto the Great Northern Highway, but all we could locate were some tarmac roads leading off into the bush.  Apparently the town was bulldozed, and it looks like they did a pretty good job.  Gold was found in the 1800s in the hills, and some of the mines are still active today.

This is our first night in an official roadside rest stop, which are located at intervals along the main highways for overnight stays.  There’s no fee to pay and they have toilet facilities, although it isn’t quite the same as finding your own quiet spot in the middle of nowhere.  There’s already been an altercation between caravan owners and the use of a generator, although Anne did think it was hilarious and was slightly disappointed when the insults stopped being hurled.  Still, the lunar eclipse has been interesting to watch and has so far lasted about three hours, with up to half the moon in the earth’s shadow.  Who needs TV when you have that to watch?  Oh, apparently the caravan owners using the generator... SPOT