There was no time for sleeping in this morning – lots to do and so little time to do it! Well not quite – it is after all, still Weipa where we are staying.
Today was the ‘Town & Mine’ tour which departed at 8.30am sharp! Together with our fellow tour participants, we scrambled aboard the bus that would be sealed for the next two hours as OH&S regulations do not allow anyone on the mine site who hasn’t sat the safety training course. It also meant (and this was clearly stated as a condition of the tour) that there would be no toilet stops for the next two hours! A quick scan of our tour companions quickly singled out the most likely to be tested by this rule – we let them sit closest to the door of the bus so they could make a dash for the facilities at the end of the tour.
Our driver, Wayne, advised that we should not be concerned by the noise the brakes on the bus made – the high pitched screeching sound was normal for these part as the bauxite dust built up on the brakes – or so he would like us to believe! I quickly took note of the nearest exits (a habit developed from years of listening to the inflight safety briefing) just in case the bauxite dust story was a cover up for poor vehicle maintenance.
A quick lap of Weipa to learn a little of its recent history was followed by a drive north over ‘the longest single span rail bridge in the southern hemisphere’ before reaching the boundary of the mine site where Wayne claimed he had to get off and sign us in – I suspected he needed to go to the toilet!
When Wayne re-joined us he radioed the controller (with thoughts of Thomas the Tank Engine entering my head) to ask permission to use the network of roads that would take us to the place where dirt was being dug up. We were sharing these roads with trucks carrying over 200 tonnes of bauxite – so best to ask for permission!
The drive out to where the raw bauxite was being dug from the ground was on the best road surface we had experienced for ages. Probably the width of the Hume Freeway and just as well engineered with an almost polished smooth surface. Soon we were watching a front end loader take 20 tonne bites from the land and deposit them in the back of rather large trucks that would whisk their load off to the place where it was sorted into just the right-sized bits of rock, washed and loaded onto a long train destined for the wharf back in town and shipped (about 95%) to Gladstone for smelting into aluminium.
The scale of operations like this never fail to impress. A scan of google earth would make the scale even more impressive now we have been here on the ground to see it first hand.
Eventually Wayne returned us to where we first set off some 2 hours earlier. I sense some passengers had a greater urgency to alight and coincidentally they headed straight for the toilets!
