Day 169, Monday, 14 September, 2009

Karratha

Over the last couple of weeks Denise has been feeling very tired towards the end of our riding day so we have been discussing the possibility of having a check up and break somewhere for 7 to 10 days. The high winds we experienced riding into Roebourne two days ago made it particulary difficult for Denise and with high winds forecast for the next few days we spent this morning looking at ways we could have our proposed break here in Karratha.

After a couple of hours’ research we came to the conclusion that it will be far too expensive for us to stay in Karratha with suitable accomodation exceeding $2000 per week …… and there is none available. (The West Australian newspaper reported that to rent an average four bedroom house in Karratha costs $2400 per week!)  The only other option would be to camp and given the type of sites available we do not think this would be very restful. We have, therefore, decided to catch the bus to Carnarvon where we can get good reasonably priced accomodation for more than a week and importantly, an appointment with a doctor.

Although we want to ride the leg to Carnarvon we feel it would not be sensible to ride into a head wind for 6 days without confirming everything is OK with Denise before hand. We could break this section of the ride into shorter sections but this would mean we would then need to  carry heavy loads of water to cover the same distance. So we came to the conclusion that under the circumstances we should catch the bus. We did look into hiring a car so that we could travel during the day and see the country but many of the hire car companies will not let their cars travel out of the Karratha region. Those that would let us hire a car charged a $1000 recovery fee to bring it back to Karratha as well as fees for every day it is away. The cheapest we could get a car for two days worked out at around $1400. The mining boom in this region certainly sees high prices charged for services.

We have booked two tickets on tomorrow’s bus to Carnarvon which leaves Karratha at 6.50pm and arrives in Carnarvon at 3.00am.

Zoom into the map and use the 'Satellite' layer to see our new location.

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