Southern Safari – Day Five

A thirty kilometre drive saw me reach Coolgardie where I topped up the Isuzu with diesel not knowing when I will next see a service station and if I do, then the price will be exorbitant.

Some rough navigation guesswork here as the vehicle satnav map is rather sparse on details.  I want to go south down Victoria Rock Road which ends at the Hyden to Norseman Road. 

When completing the Holland Track with Ken and Bob we crossed this road and I wanted to inspect the Victoria Rock campsite in the national park.  I was even thinking of spending the night there. 

The bitumen disappeared very quickly and I was back into 4WD.

The Victoria Rock camping ground is 80km south of Coolgardie.  It was empty.  no doubt because the school holidays were over.  A typical national park campsite with a long drop toilet.

Too early in the day and I decided to press on.  In some places the road was wide with a reasonable surface.  In others it was narrow and heavily corrugated.  At one point the road appeared to disappear, but I found the missing end after a brief search.  Never saw another human during the two hours.

Native woodland scrub

A right turn at the junction heading west towards Hyden.  I didn’t want to go that far as the plan was to reach the south coast in two days.   The Hyden to Norseman Road was empty but heavily corrugated.  I discovered driving on the right hand side of the road going uphill was a smoother ride and then change to the left side when going downhill.  I assumed this was because two wheel drive traffic going uphill was creating the corrugations so switching sides meant I was going up the side used by downhill traffic.  There was no traffic which meant I could travel on whatever side of the road I liked.

I crossed the Holland Track for a second time and then passed through the Rabbit Proof Fence which runs for thousands of kilometres from the north of the State down to the south coast.

Eventually I turned south onto Bushfire  Rock Road guessing it would lead me to civilization.    Shortly afterwards I left the goldfields and native woodland behind entering the SE wheat belt.  This must be near civilization as the gravel changed to bitumen

Hundreds of square kilometres of grain and it looks like there will be a bumper harvest in the west this year.  One advantage of this continent called Australia is if there is a poor harvest on one side of the continent then it’s going to be a great harvest on the other.

A right turn at the small town of Newdgate had me heading west towards Lake Grace.  I’ve been driving for nearly 12 hours and refuelled from the jerry cans twice (ie used four of the five).  After Lake Grace dusk was starting to fall and I began looking for a quiet campsite near the road.     Some 10km west of Lake Grace I noticed an area on the right in some trees.  On driving into it I discovered It had been used previously as there were the remains of several campfires.

I wanted until it was dark and then cooked myself a meal before opening the clamshell tent and heading to bed.  Despite it being a long day of driving I didn’t get a great nights sleep as it was broken by the sound of passing road trains rumbling along the adjacent road.

 

Campsite