Surprisingly enough, our second night camped on the Tanami was our warmest night yet. There was a little chill in the morning until the sun was fully up, but it quickly warmed up for another beautiful day.
Sunrise on the Tanami
We crossed the border into WA (wanted to get a photo but someone had stolen the sign!!). On the way to Halls Creek we took a detour to see the Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater and we are glad we did, WOW! It’s huge and it’s amazing to see.
Years ago we went to see another crater in Qld and after a long hot walk to get to the top, I can’t say we were impressed. But this one is totally different and definitely worth seeing.
The Wolfe Creek meteorite crater is the second largest crater in the world from which fragments of a meteorite have been collected. The crater is 880 metres across and almost circular. It’s believed that when the meteorite crashed to Earth around 300,000 years ago, it weighed more than 50,000 tonnes and would have been travelling at 15 kilometres a second.
Although the crater was officially discovered by Europeans in 1947, the Aboriginal people knew of it and called it ‘Kandimalal’. Their story is that two rainbow snakes formed the nearby Sturt and Wolfe Creeks as they crossed the desert. They believe the crater is where one snake emerged from the ground.
Now, onto some not so nice parts of the trip …..
George had mentioned earlier on that the brakes on the trailer didn’t seem to be working, we’d tried a few things out and couldn’t work out what was wrong. We weren’t sure if it was the brakes or the brake controller so we decided to continue on to Halls Creek (didn’t really have any other option anyway!) and deal with it there. We rang Cub Campers back in Sydney and asked them if they had any ideas. After telling us what to look for, George found that the wire connector for the electric brakes had been cut (obviously to do with the rocks and corrugations on the track). Cub called us back within about 5 minutes with approval to get the repair done wherever we could and they would reimburse us under warranty.
It was after this that we also realised that a chunk has been taken out of one of the trailer tyres, so we headed to the Toyota service centre to get another tyre fitted. Of course we have spares with us, but thought we’d buy another whilst we were in civilisation!
We then went in search of someone to repair the brakes! We have to give a big shout out to the boys at Baileys Auto Repairs in Halls Creek who dropped everything to fix the trailer when we randomly rocked up at the store!
Oh and in case you were all wondering …… another 30 degree day!