The day #11 of #powerTrip360 was going to see us riding from Charters Towers to the industrial town of Mt. Isa in Queensland. Mt. Isa is also famous for its vast mineral deposits and has one of the most productive single mines in the world, producing lead, silver, copper & zinc. The total kilometres to be done in the day were around 750 and it took us good 8-10 hours of riding time to reach our destination. We had already moved away from the coast line and were riding inland now. The change in the atmosphere and the flora and fauna was quite visible. The population was getting thinner and meadows had already made way for vast arid land. The temperature during the daytime had also started rising. But it also meant lesser traffic on road. The availability of petrol pumps had also started becoming an issue and will soon become one of our biggest concerns as we move further towards Northern Territory and we will need to carry spare fuel, which we had none till now.
The day was rather uneventful except for the realization that the drone was finally gone and we could do nothing about it except sending it Melbourne to get it fixed. We reached Mt. Isa by around 9 p.m. but not before spending a good amount of time on road at night, trying to capture the milky way with our Sony cameras.
And we finally entered into Northern Territory on day 12, which is our third state after New South Wales and Queensland. Northern Territory or NT as they call it is huge! In fact, huge is an understatement to describe its enormous size. But it is extremely empty as well. A minimum distance of 200-300 kilometres between 2 towns is a very common thing and we really had to plan our fuel breaks well in advance so that we don’t run out of fuel. Not surprisingly we ended up buying a 10L jerrycan to carry extra fuel. We would need this spare fuel every now and then as travel in NT and then Western Australia. Surprise of the day was finding an Indian guy running a roadhouse just before the NT border. And he gave us the authentic Indian Chai, which tasted exactly like what you get at home.
But the biggest highlight of the day was finding the road sign that said ‘speed limit 130.’ Yes, that is the fastest you can go on Australian roads officially, and that is why a lot of petrolheads flock to NT to ‘open up’ on its open roads. Here, we also started seeing Indigenous Australians or Aboriginals, the original inhabitants of Australia.Our destination for the day was Tennant Creek, which is the fifth largest town in NT and has got a sizeable population of aboriginals.