Mt. Isa – 1/21/2013
Jan 22nd, 2013 by admin
Last night’s sleep was much better than the previous night. A good night’s sleep with no weird dreams and sleeping all the way through the night probably indicates that a day of driving without any problems after we disabled the ABS has calmed us down about the state of the car. Or we’re just plain tired.
We’re on our way to Mt. Isa, the big mining center of Australia. It’s right on the Barkly highway and it’s the center of all the activity in the area. It’s been a mining center since it was founded in the 1800’s. The mines produce nickel, lead, copper and silver which has made Mt. Isa a very wealthy community since it was founded.
And Mt. Isa has plenty of people who can fix things. We saw a telly ad for a 4X4 shop and we’re headed there to find someone who can diagnose our brake problem and repair it if needed. If the problem really is the ABS system, we’ll probably continue with the ABS disabled rather than fix it. The cost of repairing the ABS in California would be very high. Here, if the parts for a 12 year old Jeep could be found at all, the cost could be astronomical.
The road just heads east flat and straight as an arrow. And flat, so very flat. We drive for 10’s of kilometers without so much as a ripple in the road surface. It’s fast (110 kph speed limit; we’re in Queensland now) but very boring. I’ll never complain about driving across “flat” Kansas again.
The only things that breaks the boredom are the road trains. Every 20 minutes or so, one comes at us in the opposite lane doing the road train max speed of 100 kph. We give them a wide berth. Their trailers (up to three) can occasionally wobble if there’s a cross wind or the driver makes a sudden steering correction and the Barkly is only a 2 lane road. There’s not a lot of room to maneuver when they go by.
The only other thing to break up the routine are the cows. This is a huge open range for the cattle stations. Though some areas are fenced, there are always strays that get out to the road. They usually just watch us go by but every now and again, one will bolt in a random direction. Hitting one of those big guys would be the end of the trip.
Some distonce still out of Mt. Isa we can just see the tops of the smoke stacks of the primary ore refineries. The mines bring the ores to the surface and then 4 hopper trailer road trains carry the ore to the refineries.
These road trains are still within the 53.5 meter lengfth restriction but they are permitted to carry up to 170 metric tons. That’s a whopping 374,000 pounds for those who are metrically challenged. And they run at 100 kph just a mere 10 kph slower than the normal traffic. And they go wherever they want on the road. They go and you get out of the way.
The first order of business in Mt. Isa is to get fuel then find a carwash and wash the red mud of the poor Cherokee. It’s had a rough week and we fell that that’s the least we can do for it. Ten AUD later the car still has some red residue on it (probably forever) but it’s generally looking pretty good. Off to find the 4X4 shop.
The shop is only a couple of blocks away. (Mt. Isa maybe the center but it’s still a small town.) We ask if they do repairs. They don’t. They only sell 4X4 accessories but they send us to Miner’s Main which is a general car repair shop and they’re sure that Miner’s Main can help us out.
Miner’s Main is, again, just a couple of blocks away. We find it and go in to the office. Things don’t look good. The shop is jammed with cars on lifts and their parking lot is also full. We tell the receptionist what we need (a diagnosis of our brake problem) and she goes off to get a mechanic to talk to us.
The mechanic comes out to see us and we tell him about the problems with our brakes and what we’ve done so far. He says he can look at the car but not until later in the afternoon. “Say, 1:30?” That’s good. We’d expected the “Can you leave the car with us for a few days” answer. “Sure, we’ll be back.
It’s not noon yet so we head off to see some of Mt. Isa. There’s not much but there is the Riversleigh Fossil Center so we haed there. The plan had been to go to Riversleigh which is about 150 kilometers north of the Barkly but, before we left Camooweal, we stopped at the Post office and talked to a woman there about the road to Riversleigh.
She strongly discouraged us from going there. They’d had a a lot of rain and although the forst 100 kilometers or so was tarmac, the last 50 was very rough dirt. That coupled with the rain made it sound like a bad idea. When we didn’t look sufficiently convinced by her warnings, she told us that we could be stopped and fined for driving on a wet dirt road. Driving on wet dirt road surface tears the road up and that can lead to the ubiquitous “Fines may apply” situation. We pass on trying for Riversleigh.
The Fossil Center display is small but very informative. The Riversleigh area is a large limestone outcrop that has exposed an ancient water hole. The limestone that precipitated out of the spring water that formed the waterhole almost immediately started the fossilization process when an animal died. Because the site was a waterhole all the animals from the area came there.
Paleontologists have found fossils of many previously unknown marsupials, some gigantic and some even meat-eating. They have dioramas of the area, pictures of the excavations, samples of fossils still in the limestone and fossils removed from the stone. For a small exhibit it’s very informative.
About 12:30 we head back to the repair shop and about 10 minutes later they take the car in. I move into the small but air-conditioned waiting area while John goes for a test drive with the mechanic. A few minutes later, John joins me in the waiting area. The test drive, of course, doesn’t show any problems. The car goes in the shop. We wait.
Catch up on the blog. Go outside. Rapdily retreat back to the air-con. Got a good internet connection. Check the news and email. Try outside again. Damn, it seems even hotter. Retreat again to the comfy air-conditioned waiting area.
The mechanic comes in. “The first problem is that there is no ABS relay. That’s why your ABS light isn’t coming on. Did you remove it?” “No. I removed the ABS fuse and the ABS solenoid fuse but not the relay.” I was pretty sure that I hadn’t removed it. “Well, I’ll have to get one before I can test the ABS. No dramas.” And he’s off again.
The missing relay is very curious. I had never seen the ABS light but I didn’t even notice that it wasn’t there during the car start-up. John said that he’d never seen it either. In the entire time that he’s had the Cherokee and he bought it used in Colorado in 2005. That’s why he said that the Cherokee didn’t have ABS. Plus, he said that the ABS had never activated even when he was driving in snow and on gravel in the desert. It’s beginning to look like it’s a strong possibility that there may have been an ABS problem before he bought the car and the previous owner tried to hide that fact by removing the ABS relay. I think I heard that on on Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers on NPR.
Back outside again. Just got to get out of the small waiting area. John and the shop owner are already in a conversation. We all chat for a while but then back to the waiting room. And out again.
The mechanic comes back out and announces that he got the relay in and was able to run the ABS check. The ABS control unit is bad. (Yahoo!! We guessed right!) He doesn’t have one but he can get one if we want him to order it. That’ll take a few days.
When we tell him, “No, thanks.”, he volunteers before we can even ask that all we have to do is continue without the ABS fuse and we shouldn’t have any more brake problems. Put the fuse and brand new ABS relay in the glove box (I think he guessed what our response would be re: ordering a new ABS unit), pay the bill (AUD111), thank everyone and back in the car.
Put Townsville in to the GPS, start the car and head off. Just outside of town, turn around and head the opposite direction past Miner’s Main when we realize that the GPS is a little confused. (This happens every once in a while). I hope that the shop people don’t notice us go by in first the wrong direction and then laetr in the right direction. If they do notice, we’ve just reinforced our “old American fools” image.
A few kilometers up the road just as we’re leaving the town proper, we come up behind a ore hopper road train. He flashes his turn signal once, the signal that it’s clear to pass, but I wait a few moments before start to pass. John wants to take a picture. When I do start to pass, when I’m up at about the second to last hopper trailer (not yet halfway past the road train), the train starts to move to the right and we’re soon trapped between the closing road train and the center median.
There’s no way I’m going to clear the pass before I have to jump the median. Luckily there’s a left turn lane in the median and I stop there and get back behind the road train.
I’d been warned about this before. Some truckers and all the road trains just signal and move when they want to change lanes. In most cases, the road trains don’t have any choice. If the lane that they are in is closing, they will not be able to stop. They have to move into the open lane.
The mistake I’d made was to not wait for John’s picture and complete the pass when I first started it. Probably the sign warning that the left lane was closing was hidden from view while I was along side the road train. Well, no harm, no foul. I get back in trail behind the road train and wait for an uphill overtaking lane to finally pass him. A few kilometers later, we do the same for another road train.
The road is fast and the side of the road looks recently burned during the recen spate of bus fires. On the horizon we can see smoke from a current fire. We head towards the smoke for a while but the the road tuns northeast and we pass the fire on the south horizon.
Farther down the road, we come upon a pilot escort car for an over-sized road. We’ve seen them many times but this one is odd. Not far behind the pilot car come two police cars with their lights flashing driving down the center line of the two lane road. Not that’s really odd. Then farther down the road we see a truck pulling a huge trailer with some piece of mining equipment on it. It really is as wide as the full width of the road. The first police car didn’t swerve at all from the center line. I assume that that’s code for the width of the coming load.
Between the two police cars, I duck across the road to a turn off area and watch the load go by. I don’t know what the equipment was but the trailer it was riding on must have had nearly 100 tires. One of the heavy lift trailers. I have no idea how they get past the occasional road trains. I assume that the truckers are in touch with each other by radio to coordinate such conflicts. No road train was pushing this load off the road. And it cetainly wasn’t back up either.
We take some pictures as the load goes by. The second police car notices that we are a left hand drive car and gives us a serious look over. I wave. He doesn’t. But he’s got other things to do and we do, too.
We finally stop for the night in Julia Creek, a wide spot in the Barkly. The wide spot has a gat station that we didn’t expect or see on the map and the requisite hotel with restaurant and pub.
Park in front. Get a room for the night. Order a couple of schooners of beer. And relax. And start the inevitable chat with a couple of guys at the bar. “On holiday?” “Kind of. We’re driving a car around the world and here we are.” “????” We’ve had this conversation before. Almost at every stop.
Next to me are a couple of Maori New Zealanders. They’re fun to talk to. The Kiwis are to Australia like the Canadians are to the US. Kind of a love hate relationship. The Aussies rareli, if ever, mention New Zealand much like Americans rarely, if ever, mention Canada. And, like all good Kiwis, they immediately launch into why New Zealand is sooo much better than Australia. A good chat.
We order some dinner and buy a bottle of wine. I chat with an Aussie who is hitchhiking his way to Townsville. Unfortunately, we can’t help him – no room in the car. He’s waiting for the bus to get the rest of the way. Hitchhiking hasn’t been too good. Almost no traffic.
Then our food is ready and we move to the dining room. A few minutes later, the hitchhiker, John, comes in for his meal and we invite him to sit with us and continue the interrupted conversation. A good chat and a good meal. Not bad wine, too.
After we finish the meal, it’s off to the room. We open the room and it’s easily near 40º in the room. We hadn’t turned on the air-conditioner before dinner. A huge mistake. We turn it on now but it’ll be hours before the room really gets cool. John and I turn on the telly, find a footy (soccer) highlight show, place the chairs in front of the air conditioner and watch the highlight show until the room cools a bit.
Eventually, its lights off and to bed. It’s been a good day. The car seems to be fine and the brake problems are resolved. Tomorrow Townsville.
Obi-wan