Waking up after my first "night out" in a while was interesting. Despite having a couple of drinks I felt fine. Woke just before sunrise, having slept on the tarp with the rest of the group for once. Jonas was just awake and took a couple of photos of the sleeping masses. Beth disappeared for a walk before the noises of the awakening mob caused the first rumbles of discontent. Chris and Antoinette were apparently not feeling too happy about the disturbance after last nights socialising ;-) I left about 8am, not too bad considering the messiness of all involved.
Robe River is one of the scenic wonder-spots of the area it seems, at least to judge by its popularity as a camping spot. There were still five or six campers and caravans there when I wandered past about 10am. Nice to look down and see fish in the river. The group plan to have lunch here even though it's only 40km from the last camp, so the afternoon could be a hard one. As I wrote my diary at the 80km mark I suspected they were still at lunch.
Today was photographing eagles day too. There are a lot of wedge- tailed eagles around, they live off road kill I guess. And contribute to it at times. They're quite fond of soaring above the trike, sitting about 10m up just in front of me for a couple of hundred metres at a time. The annoying thing is that stopping and getting the camera out makes me boring, so they always disappear and sit in a tree if I stop. Hence the blurry shots taken while riding, and the long-range shots while stopped. I did pause at one stage when there was a group of about seven of them in one place, with the idea that maybe at least one of them would be curious about the stationary trike. Ha.
I stopped at the 80km to Nanutarra marker post, roughly 82km from the start of the day. Pitched my fly between some trees to get shade and lay round writing and sleeping for a few hours in the heat of the day. 80km for the day is not too far, but I was starting to get sore knees, which usually means I'm exercising when it's too hot, or pushing too hard. Could be either, I haven't really got the hand of meandering yet, and it is pretty warm. I'm lying round naked in the shade and still sweating.
There's no really good camp sites in this stretch of road. After the experience at Whim Creek I'm a little cautious and stop right on the limit for the days riding. But eventually boredom wins and I ride a few kms up the road to see if there's anything worth camping at.
Nope. It's just like this bit - straight road, no landmarks, scrubby semi-open country. After a while it opens out a bit into spinifex country, which is no fun to camp in. I bike back, still looking in case I somehow missed as great riverside campsite. But no rivers, not even a dry creek bed. Still, the wind has come up a little so it's feeling cooler.
I'm reading Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" which is not my usual fare. It's a slice-of-life book which I find quite hard going, I suspect because I'm not really interested in the daily minutiae of people's lives. But I persist, the alternative is to re-read my lonely planet guide or buy a trash romance from a roadhouse. I was misled by the existence of a decent bookshop in Broome into thinking that maybe people out here read, so there'd be books en route. But, well, no, unless you count road atlases and bodice rippers.
I start to get hungry, and without the van to provide entertainment I decide that if I don't cook now I'll be hungry and irritable before group dinner even if the van does show up soon. So I light a fire and start cooking rice with (most of) my last bottle of water. Predictably, this causes Alan to roll round the corner just as the water comes to the boil. Just on sunset too. They decide to camp about 300m up the road, so I wait until the rice is cool enough to carry and join them. First task: refill water bottles (I carry 5 on the trike, plus I have a couple of empty ones in panniers as well as my 3l wine casks). I like to think I could actually do three days between water stops, but mostly it's just being able to not worry about running out of water.
Arriving at sunset means once again the (rest of the) group eat dinner after dark, about 8pm. Bed about 9pm, hard flat ground but nothing better in sight.