Distance covered: 1,200km (745miles)
Location: Esperance
Date: 2 February 2012
Day: 5
Things done: Beer,
wine and Cheese tasting, Stingray spotting, swimming in reservoir, climbing bicentennial
tree (me not all the way… screw that…), camping by the beach in Cape Riche.
Tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-tick-tick-tiiick…
We just left Stonehenge, not the real
Stonehenge in the UK of course, the fake Stonehenge just outside Esperance that
someone has erected in their back garden to take money from some unfortunate
people. We were confused by this ‘attraction’
and couldn’t quite get to grips why people would want to visit it as the magic
of Stonehenge is its mysteriousness and its age. The one outside Esperance is just a few rocks
placed in a circle. We didn’t pay to go
in as we didn’t want to support this man’s baseless business, he’ll have
Hadrian’s wall next!
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| We're on the road to nowhere |
Tick……tick……tick….tick…tick..tick.tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick…. “There’s that noise again” I said to the guys
as we pulled out onto the road heading from Esperance to Cape Le Grand. I turned off the radio and opened the
window. The ticking continued and the tempo
matched the engine revs. What the hell
was it!? We pulled over and opened up
the bonnet. With the engine still
running, we listened in the engine bay but couldn’t hear anything. I carefully slipped my hand around the back
to find the throttle and slowly increased the revs. The ticking began again. It was coming from the left hand side. Our thoughts immediately went to the worst
case scenario. The cambelt. We’d had it changed before we left and
wondered whether a bolt had come loose.
We looked behind us and in front, we were half way between Esperance and
Cape Le Grand. Should we continue or
should we go back to Esperance. We
continued, slowly edging Walter along the road to the campsite.
 |
| Walter exposed in the middle of nowhere. |
We stopped
at the camp entrance and looked on in anxious despair as the road wound into
the distance. The road was dead quiet
and travelled through short bushes. The
view was amazing. Such a beautiful landscape
but our thoughts were submerged in doubt over Walter’s future. Flashbacks ran through our minds of people in
Perth telling us that we wouldn’t make it out of the city, let alone across the
country. Well, he had taken us through
tastes and stingrays of Margaret River, the forests of Walpole, Albany to here. Could this be it? I urge myself to stop being so negative and
we decided to sleep on it and take Walter back to Esperance to see a mechanic
the following day. The sunset over Cape
Le Grand was stunning. We sat on the
beach with cheese and beer and tried to forget about the impending problems.
 |
| Sunset over Cape Le Grand, Esperance |
The clouds
loomed above us as we looked under Walter’s hood the following morning. I was fearing this moment all night and hoped
that the tick would have just disappeared.
It hadn’t. I scouted around the engine
bay in an attempt to find something that could be fixable. My hand brushed the alarm/immobiliser. The noise stopped. I grabbed the throttle and tugged on it with
my right index finger whilst holding the alarm. No ticking.
I let go of the alarm and the ticking had started again. Well, there we have it. That was our problem. A loose bolt on the alarm caused it to vibrate
against the body work as the revs increased.
Mike retrieved his mini toolkit and tightened the problematic bolt. With that sorted and smile on our face, we
had to decide what we were going to do. Esperance
is a place for the sun, but the rain had started and the forecast wasn’t good for
the next few days so we made the decision to move on and make our way to the
Nullarbor and the road out of Western Australia.
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| Big trees near Denmark |
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