Over and Out: 600km Across the Kimberley Pt 2
Sealing the Gibb River road would make it easy but where's the fun in that?Part one got us to the dirt. Part two is where the Gibb River road starts charging for the privilege.
Since the mid-2000s the bitumen has been creeping in from both ends, cutting roughly 200km off the gravel. One day the two sealed sections will meet in the middle, and when they do the Gibb becomes a drive almost any car could do.
That sounds like progress. Our man Dan spends the episode working out whether it actually is...
The answers come from people who live with the road rather than visit it. Third-generation grazier Minna Burton runs half a million acres from a helicopter, with the nearest pub 500km away, and wants the bitumen for her cattle while quietly worrying about what it brings with it.
At Over the Range Tyre and Mechanical, a workshop with no walls and no concrete floor at the halfway mark, mechanic Jonty gives the single most useful piece of Gibb advice there is, and it has nothing to do with tyres. The sealing bill, for the record, runs to about $1.3 million per kilometre.
In between there is a 12km four-wheel-drive track that takes 90 minutes, a puncture, a $950 fuel stop for three vehicles on one pump, Bell Gorge, the 750m limestone cave network at Tunnel Creek, and a field-expedient physics lesson on why corrugations exist and why they will never stop existing.
There is also a camp-oven roast lamb that very nearly ends in violence.
And there is a verdict on the Ford Ranger Super Duty after a few thousand kilometres of the worst surface in the country. Ford developed the thing on this road before anyone knew it existed, and it shows.
Eleven to 12 litres per 100km, a 3.0-litre turbo-diesel V6 old enough to have had its faults ironed out, and a snorkel that pipes the induction noise straight into the driver’s right ear.
The run finishes in Broome at the Willie Creek Pearl Farm, where the best pearl the farm has ever produced is worth a quarter of a million dollars and was found by an eight-year-old on a tour.
That is season one of Out There done. Watch part two above, and tell us in the comments where series two should go...
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