The Terrifying Road Of Death

We left Karijini bright and early in the morning, eschewing breakfast but not steaming cups of coffee, deemed necessary both to revive our sleep-fuddled minds and warm the cockles – cockles are definitely best warm and mine were in danger of turning to ice. Tom Price wasn’t much better – the town famed for being the highest in WA was very, very cold at 9 in the morning in the middle of winter. We made a beeline for a café where we devoured piping hot egg and bacon toasted sandwiches, sat with our faces turned up to the sun like sunflowers, desperate for some warmth.

We were taking the Tom Price railway access road, which runs alongside the railway used to transport iron ore from the mines in Tom Price to the port in Dampier where it is loaded onto the ships. It is the most direct route from Tom Price to Karratha but is privately owned and maintained by Rio Tinto which, due to Australia’s crazily tight health and safety laws, meant that we had to watch a video before we were given a permit to drive it. The twenty-minute long video turned out to be one of the best comedies I have seen in a long time. And no, I don’t think it was intentionally funny. It began with some dramatic music, the type that would accompany a disaster movie. Then came some scenic shots of the Pilbara, presumably designed to relax you, to lull you into a false sense of security much as might happen on the road itself, before you are bombarded with a montage of images of wrecked cars – overturned, crumpled, on fire, they had it all. Cue deep-voiced Australian narrator with the chilling words, “ordinary people just like you didn’t make it out alive.” He then proceeded with a list of anything and everything that could go wrong, resulting in death or at the very least a long stay in hospital and permanent, debilitating injuries. Now, none of us had driven this road before and, granted, it is an unsealed road running parallel to a railway line but we weren’t about to traverse a crumbling, thousand-feet drop cliff edge or drive through a war zone. It was as if they were intentionally putting the fear of God into us, trying to persuade us not use their precious road. It was the most melodramatic information video I have ever seen. We all burst out laughing several times over the course if it, clamping our hands over our mouths in case we were refused the permit on the grounds that we weren’t taking this potentially fatal road seriously enough.

I was the designated driver for the first part of the journey and so scared had they made me that I was very jittery to begin with, and drove nervously and shakily – surely the opposite of what they wanted to achieve. Around every corner I expected a six-trailer beast of a road train to plough towards me, over every crest a Rio inspector to interrogate me. I waited in terror for the bumps and furrows in the road to tip our car over, or throw us towards an oncoming train. They had shown every imaginable (and unimaginable) disaster that could possibly befall us and made it seem likely that at least one of those tragedies might occur. After thirty minutes of nervous driving, I realised that the car probably wasn’t about to spontaneously erupt into a fireball of flames, nor were we likely to roll across onto the track and be crumpled by a seven-mile long train. During the three-hour drive to the end of the permit zone, we encountered a grand total of four vehicles, of which only one was a (very short) road train. The journey passed completely without incident and we were left wondering what on earth they were going on about. This was truly health and safety gone crazy. Still, I was pretty proud that I drove the entire length of the road of death all on my own - *cue dramatic music* we were ordinary people and we did make it out alive. What a survival story.