Dangerous breakdown

Temperature - Day (maximum):
Rain / Sunshine

Capricorn Roadhouse – 24.04.2001

We get into our car in the pouring rain and leave our pleasant accommodation. About 40 km after the small town of Meekatharra, we stop for a few minutes in a parking lot. As always, I walk around the Holden and trailer to check that everything is in order. Only in the corner of my eye do I notice an irregularity on the right rear tire. I want to keep walking, but a vague feeling makes me pause to take a closer look at the tire. I can hardly believe my eyes at first. “Gosh Tanja, look at that! A few more kilometers and we would have torn the tire!” “I can’t believe it! That would have been a disaster with the heavy load.” She answers and looks at the spot where the profile has come loose over about 15 square centimeters. I kneel in front of the broken tire and ponder what we should do now. The next petrol station is at least 250 kilometers away and the mining town of Newmann is probably more than 400 km away. Who knows if you can buy such a tire at the next rest stop? Even if I put the spare tire on here now, that doesn’t guarantee that I’ll have another flat tire soon. By then at the latest, we will look old. Even without camels, the distances from service point to service point here in Western Australia are huge. “We’ll turn back,” I decide, because I can imagine that there are tires like this for sale in Meekatherra.

It takes us a whole hour to sneak back the 40 km. We quickly find a garage that fits us with two new tires. After a total of four hours, we find ourselves back where we discovered the damage and continue our journey. It is already dark when the temperature suddenly rises by perhaps 10 degrees. As if we had overcome a weather barrier, the climate changed abruptly. We are only a short distance from the Tropic of Capricorn latitude, which we crossed with our camels not too long ago. I will never forget this latitude because on its northern side grow some poisonous plants that are deadly for our camels. Well, this time it is safe to cross this line, except that it is apparently much warmer on the other side. We then find lousy, expensive accommodation in the Capricorn Roadhouse where the mosquitoes regard us as fair game and feed on our blood all night.