Day 105 | MCP: he puts his feet up after spending time washing them

rest day

After 14 days on the road it’s time for a couple of days break.

There’s some things to do.

Like, umm.

Well, the washing.

Ok, done. So little humidity it takes minutes to dry.

Changing the tyres around again, I’m assuming I’ll be avoiding sand for a while, might save the Petrol and Nobby Nic for the Gibson Desert, I’ve got 192 km to Sandstone on the dirt then 400 km or so on asphalt until I get to Laverton.

Catching up with 2 weeks correspondence.

Updating the blog. I’ve written it all out the dead tree way, now just have to tap out and upload 15 days worth.

Buy a few day’s supplies, but not too much, sick of dragging excessive weight around.

That’s it.

OK, I realise I only need a couple of nights here but I do enjoy chatting with some humans once again. I’m having a third, and can cope with the $10 accommodation cost for a grassed tent site.

I stayed here on my Karratha to Esperance leg of my westward little adventure but a month later in the calendar, it was starting to heat up then. There’s been a change in the ownership and also a few more people around due to the weather still on the mild side.

There are a few passing through travellers, here today, 1000 km away tomorrow, it’s the speed route between Perth and Darwin.

The majority seem to be prospectors, gold fever style. Got their brand new electronic metal detectors and they are gunna strike it rich. They have the mid range model, they aren’t the Prado drivers here, Meeka’s not exactly upmarket. May not have found much yet but it takes time.

Dave, a shaven headed guy, decades acquiring that super shaggy goatee, plenty of ink on the body, saves on the sunscreen I guess, comes in to do his washing, been out on his lonesome near Mt Gould for 2 weeks doing his prospecting thing, now need to do the washing and picking up some supplies.

He’s on a roll, having actually found a few nuggets, proudly showing his stash. The biggest is 42 grams, worth almost $3000 and there’s a dozen nuggets that get progressively smaller, $15 grand in total.

I fondle them to get a sense of what to look for, they are quite heavy, funny that, realising I’ll be most unlikely to just stumble across nuggets, he dug them out a foot down. There’s no water so people don’t do the traditional panning for gold round here, just take the big lumps.

He thinks the day trippers are just going over the same ground being worked every winter, the easy to get to locations close to Meeka. Waste of time, it’s all been looked at closely for over a hundred years. Reckons you can pick up a near new “useless” detector as summer rolls around for a $6000 discount.

Dave’s approach is to bash out somewhere a long way from others after having spent time with maps and aerial photos to spot the most promising locations. Sounds a good theory and he has $15k of gold for a couple of weeks, hard, work.

And he thinks if you don’t treat it like a job, ie, put in a standard 10 hour day there’s not going to be much gold in the bucket at the end of the week.

I sense it could be entirely frustrating, I’m satisfied with my more modest lot in life, trundling along deserted desert roads, lost in my own dreams, which generally have little to do with material riches.