July 1: Cockle What?
When selecting which remote outpost to stay at last night, my eyes lit up when I spied the Cockelbiddy Hotel Motel on Google Maps. Although its name sounds like a combination of a rooster’s call and an angry old lady, Adventure Baby and I both got a great night’s rest there before hitting the road for a trip today filled with other quirky surprises.
Heading west on the Eyre highway just after sunrise, I passed a sign proclaiming that we were hitting the longest stretch of straight road in Australia. I found the announcement humorous because it was the only notice I’ve seen so far in Australia described in miles instead of kilometers, perhaps so Americans would understand?
Although the route was indeed quite straight the landscape included a colorful combination of scrubby, sage-colored bushes, spiky brown parched tundra, tufts of yellow grass, deep orange dirt, and smatterings of tall green leafy trees, all beneath a bright blue sky with puffs of white clouds.
Stopping in Belladonna to gas up, I wandered into the service station’s museum only to discover a display of the largest single piece of a US Skylab recovered when the unit’s orbit decayed back in July of 1979 and the workshop disintegrated in the atmosphere. The piece of torn and bent metal was the fragment of an oxygen tank. Wow!
Back on my way, I encountered several aircraft landing strips for the Royal Flying Doctor Service right in the middle of the road. These evacuation zones are designated with large white stripes that look like cross walks in the middle of nowhere so that aircraft retrieving seriously injured people requiring urgent medical attention in remote areas have a designated place to land.
Continuing west I passed large groves of Ghost Gum trees with beautiful distinctive orange and white bark that peels back in layers, adding even more color to the already orange dirt. Riding alongside several dried-up salt lakes, I took in the delightful oval-shaped, orange and pink sandy beds littered with clusters of short scrubby brush.
Reaching the small town of Koolgarlie, I rode up a dirt and gravel path to take a look at the Fimiston Pit, one of Australia’s largest open-pit gold mines. This massive excavation site was created by merging several smaller ones and includes stunning layers of grey, orange, pink, white, and brown ore, rock, clay, silt, and gravel with various minerals including quartz, pyrite, and gold. What a great day on the bike!
