Day 51 | Canna Nature Reserve: about, err, 50km short of today's objective
29 km | zzOz total: 2,571 km
I’ve been following a trainline, originally constructed 80 years ago to remove the wheat harvest, currently being upgraded, 600mm of extra ballast, and new bridges in the floodways, to take the heavy ore trains.
When you stop for lunch before 11am motivation might be an issue. Moving air, rushing faceward, became a major disincentive to move.
Dunno, when you smash down a sealed road, little traffic, magnificent undulations, a cloudless sky, less than 13km/hour ain’t cranking.
To distract myself, after all it’s Saturday morning, I listen to Geraldine Doogue on Radio National, an intelligent and perceptive interviewer, on safari in mid-West WA, about what’s happening in the very area I’m travelling through.
There’s a project to build a massive deepwater port from scratch just north of Geraldton, that’s a town of about 30,000 people not so far away, and a 580km railway line, a billion, or was it 10 billion, dollar investment, the breakwater will take 3 years of dumping rock, around the clock, 2km out in the Indian Ocean, to accommodate 200,000 ton ships, the ore being of the iron type, from a number of newish mines, much further south than the current zone of activity, the Pilbara.
She talks to the local government hierarchy in Perenjori, ie, where I stopped to dash off a couple of blogs yesterday, about the issues where a small town, 300 people, is flooded with FIFOs, fly in fly out workers, and on reflection there was a preponderance of white Toyota 4WDs and hi-vis jackets in the main street.
There’s no spare accommodation in town apparently, the local shops can’t find retail staff, too much big money to be made somewhere else. The bizarre aspect is that due to successive relative wheat crop failures the local postcode had then lowest per capita income in Australia last year, $19,000.
It’s a strange upside down world, transforming due to international investment.
Meanwhile, I sail along, slowly, almost oblivious, out there with my ring necked parrots.