Shattered glass and red dust

It had to happen, I suppose. There we were, tooling along, after an early morning start from Coen, on a fairly vile, dusty road north, when we saw a road train approaching.

John slowed almost to a standstill, and just as the road train passed, loaded with earthmoving equipment, something (a rock, or maybe a piece of the road train’s equipment) struck the driver’s window, and it shattered into a million pieces.

John was unhurt, although covered in pieces of glass, and I can tell you, he told God about it for a minute or so, then we cleaned the glass out of the cabin, made a temporary window out of black plastic and duct tape, but eventually discarded that in favour of just open air  . . . and dust . . . for the next 200 or so km until we reached Weipa.

We were so shocked and stunned we hadn’t even thought about taking photographs.

We checked into the delightful camping ground in Weipa, full of huge old trees, right on the foreshore, and went in search of assistance. Rather than order a new window to be available in Cairns, and spend the next week or so on our journey to the Cape and back fighting the dust, we found that Weipa Smash Repairs could get a new one from Melbourne in a few days.

It will arrive in Cairns on Monday, be here the next day, it will take an hour or so to fit, and we’ll be on the road again.

It’s no hardship to be here, as the shady campground is right next to a substantial shopping centre with a supermarket, butcher, hot bread shop, pharmacy, and even a hairdresser and beautician, where I have an appointment for a bit of maintenance.

John jokes that the only thing missing, as far as I’m concerned, is a shoe shop!

One of the giant trucks at Weipa.

We took the mine tour on our second day here (today) and it was a real eye opener. We knew the area is full of red dust, but you haven’t seen red dust until you see the bauxite mining operations. It is literally only a few metres under the topsoil, which is scraped off for later planting and restoration. Then the ore is just pushed up into piles, loaded into giant trucks (each tyre costs $10,000), taken to an unloading point where it is dumped, goes through a cleaning process, and within 11 minutes, is loaded into railway trucks, ready to be taken to the port area where it goes into bulk container ships, mostly for refinement into alumina at Gladstone, but some goes overseas as ore.

A truck being loaded with bauxite ore. That's the red
 dust of Weipa. 

The town is owned by Rio Tinto and just about everyone works for the company. The estuary is full of crocodiles and the bus driver told us five dogs had been taken in the past few weeks, so warned everyone against paddling in the water.

The forecast for the weekend is storms, so I’m actually quite pleased to be somewhere fairly civilised, rather than bush camping.

Lots of 4WDs and camper trailers are pulling in, wearing their covering of red dust like a badge of honour, and we just sit under our big tree and marvel at the wide variety available. There are lots of young families around us at present but the campground empties out pretty quickly each morning as people head north or south, filling up again after lunch. We’ll be the proper ‘old hands’ by the time we leave on Tuesday or Wednesday.