Day 200 | near Bitumen Tank: after a day introducing myself to the local wildlife

122 km | Heading west total: 8,907 km

The highlight of the day might have been seeing a really healthy dingo in a creek bed but a bit further down the road I caught sight of 6 camels.

This was rather strange: I’d biked the Tanami and not seen any camels at all in the 1150 km. That’s where you would expect to find them, in the desert area, not 100s of kilometres further north near a busy road.

Later I ran into a couple while I was eating my lunch, who didn’t bother with the usual interrogation: we somehow ended up talking about the organic tanning of leather instead. I remembered that my father had bought a pair of shoes in London that had been tanned using this method, actually from the same tannery that had done the leather that was used in the Brendon voyage from Ireland to North America in the 1970s. The shoes were from a pattern that had been initially made at the time of the Black Death, a single piece of leather. Funny thing was this guy I met was the third son of that particular family tanning business and had come out to Australia instead.

The factory closed down a couple of years ago: the leather never wore out.