Karijini Eco Resort to Nanutarra Roadhouse

 An early start today, we covered 80km to the mining town of Tom Price. After an excellent bacon and egg roll we lined up at the visitors centre to collect our hard hat and safety glasses and boarded a bus for a 90 minute tour of the Tom Price mine. An excellent tour, our driver explained the amenities of Tom Price which was purpose built for the mine in the 1960’s. 


We then entered the mine proper and it is proper impressive. The Tom Price mountain is at least half gone and there is a massive hole in the ground which is no longer used and is expected to be filled in over time with tailings. 

The iron ore is sorted by grade then transported to the crushers and crushed into either 6mm or 40mm size. 



The crushers are fed by conveyor belts from this mine and other nearby sites with one conveyor being 50km in length!  




We drove through the crushing plants and that was particularly interesting for me, looking at all the electric motors and reticulation systems. I would love to have a more in depth tour. I do wonder about the health impacts on the workers in such a dusty environment but I guess in this day and age there are mitigations in place. 


There sure are some impressive machines in this place. 


We also saw the huge machine that buckets up the finished product, deposits it on a conveyor belt to a hopper which then fills the railway wagons. They can fill a 2.5km train in under 4 hours! 







 

A massive business and I guess it contributes to most peoples superannuation and kiwisaver accounts. 

After the tour we felt in need of sustenance so visited a bakery we spied earlier. They had a delectable looking custard square but I almost didn’t get it as the guy behind the counter couldn’t understand what I was asking for. Then the penny dropped, they call them vanilla slices here, we both had a chuckle about it and I got my fix. 

By now it was after 12 and we still had 350 or so km to go. Unfortunately we had a rare navigation hickup. We ended up on a dirt road and at first it wasn’t too bad having been recently graded, then we passed another mine site and things changed dramatically, the corrugations almost swallowed us whole. We consulted the map and indeed this was a short cut but another 50 or 60km of this, I don’t think so. So we turned around and our 350km was closer to 450km. 

Once we got going the road was excellent and we made good time to Paraburdoo where we had an ice cream and topped up with gas. 

We now had 275km to go. The temp kept rising into the late 30’s and the wind became very strong. The road meandered a bit and so we went from a head wind to a cross wind and was quite gusty in places. At one section of straight road I was leaned right over just keep in a straight line. Ah the joys of motorcycling. 

This is probably the most desolate place we have ridden through on this trip, so signs of life or water and very scrubby looking plants eking out an existence. This hot, dry wind must just suck the moisture out of everything. No wonder there was a road sign warning that we were entering a remote area and to carry extra water.

We arrived at our destination for the night, the Nanutarra Roadhouse with 8km range left showing on the trip computer. 

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