11th June 2026: awoke early to be at Junction Engineering at 7 am. We then had a coffee and returned to the caravan park and made bookings for Punsand Caravan park and made arrangements to get to TI from Seisia where it is no longer safe to leave a caravan or car. Chris did a wonderful job cleaning up the old stability leg and making a new handle for it and installing it for us! However, he also noticed that the tyres were badly worn on very inside rims so we made a trip straight away to Tyre Power, who can fit 2 new tyres tomorrow am at 7am! However he noticed that one of the arms of the shock absorbers was hanging loose, so this necessitated a trip to Repco where another Chris fixed our suspension! We made it back to the Caravan park in time for our 12.30 Weipa Town and Mine tour, where our guide was Brett a bulldozer driver and trainer of heavy vehicle drivers for Rio Tinto. He runs the tours as a private business sideline.

The tour was great! Brett explained the history of different parts of Weipa and then we went to the Andoom mine site where we were able to get very close to the large conveyor belt taking mined bauxite from trucks down a large funnel into slowing moving train carriages of a 32 car train. We then went right up to the 3 large mounds of bauxite divided according to how much silica they contain . We then watched the bulldozers picking up 50 ton loads of bauxite and very efficiently dumping them into one of 15 trucks on rotation each with a capacity of 300 tons. During the dry season they mine 28,000 tons of bauxite daily and during the wet season 10 to 20,000 tons. They have special fatigue monitoring systems based in Los Angeles looking at the drivers eye lids. All machines are monitored from Brisbane Rio Tinto who know exactly where each vehicle is at any given time. Workers must be based in Weipa not FIFO and bulldozer drivers earn $145,000 for 6 months work per year working 12 hour shifts 7 days on 7 days off including time on night duty.

We then went food shopping at Woolworths, then had a meal at the Weipa Bowling club because it had been quite an emotionally exhausting day dealing with the caravan issues!!, came home and sorted out the caravan for the morning by hitching it up! 















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
 June 2nd: We investigated the 2 waterholes/walks available to us here at Mt Hart. Firstly we went to Matthew Gorge where there were a group of Outback spirit clients who had been flown in from Broome because of the road closures. Matthew Gorge was surrounded by many squarecut black rocks on all sides. We caught up with Kurt who was now one of their tour guides. We had a swim in the Gorge then Nic and I followed the gorge upstream doing a lot of rock hopping. We went a fair way up but not to the very end.  We then visited Barker Pool where we were the only ones there- saw the usual collection of birds - lots of Willy Wagtails , peaceful doves, tiny pale yellow honeyeaters and blackfaces cuckoo shrikes not to mention ravens and magpie larks. We returned to camp and had a walk along the banks of the Barker River bleeding the camp site. We had dinner at the restaurant- rack of lamb for Nic and Shark Bay Snapper for me! We visited Kurt who is sleeping in his car in the camp ground...
Read more
Image
 July 31st: Awoke to a clear sky and we set off on our Lake Eyre flight, which was actually 5 hours of flying with a stopover at Birdsville for lunch. Seeing Lake Eyre North filled with water was one thing, but travelling over the Channel country where the Diamantina River and Coopers Creek, both in flood break up into a myriad of channels such that there is water from one horizon to the other, was truly spectacular! Coopers Creek has only just reached Lake Eyre. There is only local rain causing a little bit of filling only for south Lake Eyre, but there is no water yet going through the Goyder channel connecting the two halves of the Lake.We ate at the Birdsville Hotel then went to Birddvisitors centre to learn more about the Lake Eyre Basin. On the way back we saw Goyder lagoon which was a huge area of water. We also saw the Birdsville track flooded and it was easy to see way it is closed and will be for some time. We didn’t see as many birds as I thought we might. We saw pelican...
Read more
Image
 July 29th: It rained all night and it was still raining when we woke up so we decided to stay in Quorn for another day. We walked down to Scrubby Fella’s for a coffee and a biscuit and had them sitting on either side of their slow combustion stove. We then went on a muddy walk from the back of the caravan park to a garden of Bush foods and Bush medical plants. We particularly took notice of the avenue of quandongs.We then climbed up an embankment and walked along the outside fence of the van park, circumnavigating it as we walked amongst acacias, mulga and bamboo and got even more muddy. I then did the final load of wash for the trip- hard to resist when there was a drier available! Nic cleaned our skylight and attempted to fix its small leak, which has come to light with the rain. It isn’t obvious what the cause of the leak is. I then received a phone call from Arid Air that 2 places on their Lake Eyre flight out of Marree had become available, for July 31st, so we leave for Marr...
Read more