The Road Through Nowhere

Karratha, like all communities in remote WA, does not sprawl. As soon as you leave the boundary road, you’re in nothingness. It ends abruptly so that you suddenly find yourself on an empty road surrounded by barren, sun-baked land stretching as far as the eye can see. For a city girl, that can be quite disconcerting. When you’re somewhere as remote as this, you really do feel like an insignificant dot in a vast landscape – a landscape that has been here, as it is, for sixty million years. That thought in itself is enough to realise one’s own import in the world. Of course, this also makes travelling anywhere, whether on foot or in a vehicle, potentially dangerous. Mobile phone signals die soon after leaving the towns, making it possible to become stranded on even a short journey, so it is essential to be prepared. Whether you get lost whilst out hiking or your car breaks down, if you don’t have adequate water you’re in trouble. We’ve bought a container of water that is almost as big as me to put in the car on journeys of an hour or more and always carry a couple of bottles of water in the boot wherever we’re going. Although Australia is home to numerous deadly creatures which have the ability to scare the wits out of most of us, the reality is that it is probably easier to die from dehydration than getting bitten by a snake or chomped on by a crocodile.

The emptiness of the land also allows for an almost completely straight road in between destinations. On a recent trip, we were only driving for about twenty minutes before coming across the neighbouring town but even in that time we felt our minds going blank, sedated by monotony. At one point, there was ever so slight a curve in the road and it felt like an effort to manoeuvre the car around it. I can imagine that after hours of such driving, accidents on an empty road could be a very real possibility. Yup, just another hazard out here! Twice along the road we passed a road train, a monster of a lorry hitched to multiple trailers, giving it a length of up to one hundred and fifty feet long. The couple we saw weren’t that long but they’re still big enough to involuntarily and unconsciously make yourself smaller in your seat. Or perhaps that was just me. Suffice to say though, you want to give these trucks some room – the entire road if necessary – as you’re not going to fair well in a collision with one. We also encountered another sort of train – this one on tracks – which was so long we couldn’t see the front of it. We were lucky to be driving up to the tracks just as the last carriage was about to pass across the road as you can be waiting thirty minutes for one of these to pass though completely, and the long line of vehicles on either side was testament to that.

This is a country where the journey itself can be part of the adventure.