21st August Kununurra 365 kms today 7,521 kms to date

We were woken up early by the trucks and utes starting for the work crews to hit the road just after sunrise.  We saw them on the road to Warmun repairing the highway.  Alan stopped at the Shell service station to buy some injector cleaner in the hope it clears up the hesitation in the GS.  We met “Brouggy” who was a Dutch cyclist heading for Fitzroy Crossing.  He was carrying more than we were.

We stopped for a break at Warmun and I looked at my rear tyre.  It is on the way out and I really need to get it replaced at Kununurra.  There is no way I could have ridden the Duncan/Buntine Hwy with this rear tyre.

There were a lot of burnt out areas along the side of the road and the hills were steep-sided with trees growing up the slopes.  Behind the little hill on the other side of the road is the world’s largest diamond mine – Argyle Diamond Mine.  We tried to visit it but it was too hard to organise.

There are huge 4 trailer road trains coming from the mines along the Northern Hwy and this one passed Alan as I was taking some photos.

We had lunch at the Doon Doon Road House, which is my favourite in this area.  It is run by a Dutch couple and we stopped there in 2010 on our ride around Australia.  They were obviously a well organised community and this included dealing with Cane Toads!

There were a few problems at the tyre shop in Kununurra.  The tyre they had set aside was a knobby and unsuitable for riding to Brisbane.  They didn’t have many other tyres in stock because they were cleaned out by the riders coming back from the Off Centre Rally and hadn’t restocked.  But one tyre was found, a Metzler Tourance which was slightly smaller than the Heidenau but will do the job OK.  The problem was that they didn’t have a 17” inner tube.  Luckily, I had had the punctured 17” inner tube patched by Neville back at Over the Range on the GRR and they put that back in.  In the showroom of the dealer there was a 100 Watt Marshall amp for a very reasonable price.  It belonged to the owner but no traveler had room for it me included.

We stocked up on food for dinner, breakfast and lunch plus beer and a bottle of wine.  Our cabin is on the banks of the Ord River and we enjoyed a few beers while watching the sunset reflected on the hills.

Alan worked out that we have 3,000 kms to get to Chinchilla next Sunday so there will be some big riding days ahead.  The DR copes well with highway riding but its not very comfortable and quite tiring to ride.  In contrast the BMW just eats up the miles despite the misfiring.