It's 3:30am as I stumble from my warm comfortable bed, shower and dress for a mine site trip. Steel toecap boots, cotton shirt and trousers. Grabbing the laptop I leave for the office, I've decided to collect the "preliminary" manual the factory has so kindly deemed to send me. Ten minutes later I'm on my way to the Domestic Airport.
The roads are empty at this time of night but the airport car park is full. In one of those strokes of brilliance that grab corporate minds, parking now consists of 2 areas. A premium area, nearest to the terminal, for those fat waddling cats on expenses that need to save 20 seconds on each trip to or from their cars. They of course pay substantially more for this 'privilege'. Us poorer peasants that can find a space in what's left after the addition of extra traffic lanes and concrete barriers, have to walk an extra 20 paces. Gives us a moment to reflect on whether the extra "premium" fees makes up for the reduced total number of cars parked. After all, there was just so much space to start with - as everybody who has ever been made late for a flight driving endlessly round and round looking for a space before giving it up and slamming it up a verge and bolting for the check-in, knows.
This morning I'm early, so early in fact I join the end of a long queue waiting for someone to turn up and open the check-in desks. "Arrive at least an hour before your domestic flight" trumpets QANTAS on its booking forms - "It gives us another chance to add an interminable and pointless wait into your day"' they don't bother to print. Next, to the queue for the scanner. I stop with a line of blokes to start unlacing my boots. This is a flight to a mine site and not surprisingly everyone is wearing steel toecaps. So everyone has to take them off. Not a problem this morning - but as we empty our pockets of such dangerous items as nail clippers and remove our laptops from their cases in case... something......... its worth remembering that in a few moments the First Class passengers will be served a QANTAS "breakfast" in a box marked, I always feel a little sarcastically, "Enjoy", with a real metal knife - and fork. That will be safe then, they can use them to fight off the nasty peasant hijackers who are desperate to go somewhere other than Paraburdoo and are prepared to pedicure someone into submission to do it!
Now I have bought a ticket from our major airline (OK, only airline) to Tom Price. So why are you heading to Para you say. Ah well there is a connecting "flight". Notice the quote marks? This flight has eight wheels at the back and 2 at the front, it is, indeed, a bus. We stand around as the pleasant and jovial driver, attired in typical Aussie garb of boots, calf length socks, shorts and a T-shirt loads first our baggage, then today's newspapers and then the mail into the buses hold. This illustrates an interesting quirk of the Australian postal system. There are countless mail and courier options provide by a plethora of companies. A maze of rates with urgent sounding names such as overnight, general, express or priority compete using an endless range of pricing structures. Indeed, in Perth a call to any one of the companies will have them rushing to you to collect your urgent package and deliver it to their depot - well not Australia Post, you have to deliver to them - where upon they sort it into destinations and send it to the airport. At that point it is loaded onto the next available passenger flight and thus off into the wide blue yonder. At the other end it is unloaded after the passengers luggage, which can also be tagged as priority for the extra paying, steel cutlery served, First Class Passengers and put all together on the same tow-cart and dragged round to the bus. The bus driver now loads it all into the hold, paying scant regard to the expressly marked, urgent items and we lumber off across the bush.
Its 71kms to Tom Price from Paraburdoo and the trip takes a leisurely hour. This gives plenty of time to soak up the wonderful pink landscape with, as it's the start of spring, countless wild flowers. The Pilbara is a massive area, when compared with something like, say, Europe, and is predominately, overwhelmingly, pinky red in colour. This is due to the huge quantities of iron ore. Around 35% of the dirt in places is iron, and it's just out there in all weathers, so it rusts. Hence the colour. Some years ago, Aussie legend has it, a man called Lane Hancock wandered out here and made a marvellous discovery - that there was iron to be mined. How everybody else travelling through had failed to notice this is disregarded, but he became fabulously rich and died leaving a vast fortune for his widow, daughter and countless lawyers to squabble over for years to come. As this provided endless media stores and thus sold many newspapers it can really be said that the Pilbara's iron has fuelled many sections of the Australia economy.
Now whilst we sit and enjoy the scenery, the mail rests below us. We pull into Tom Price on time, next to the small line of shops, including the newsagents - so that's the newspapers delivered then - and us passengers disembark for our exciting, and no doubt varied, days in Tom Price. The mail; that is delivered by an Agent. Each town has an agent for the courier companies, big places sometimes more than one, no-doubt, and they complete the delivery. All very efficient, but making a nonsense of the differing rates and services at the Perth end.
Evening approaches and another ride on the bus, which features in-flight entertainment. Yes the driver has a tape deck and 2" speakers front and back. We roll across the countryside to such classics as the Supremes Greatest Hits and the not so great, Bay City Rollers. The tapes were probably new when the bus was.
Remember those steel toecap boots? Well it's hot out in the Pilbara, even early in the spring like this, and everybody has been in those boots for about 14 hours now. Thankfully Paraburdoo is a little airport and nobody has heard of a metal detector so all those feet can stay strapped into their sweaty enclosures for another couple of hours yet!
We took off into one of those perfect, stark sunsets. The land is completely black, jagged hills cut viciously into a brilliant orange band of light, which fades slowly through yellow to pale blue and then merges up into a blue-black sky. A solitary, bright white star gleams low on the western horizon. Its Friday night and the pilot obviously wants to be back in Perth as soon as we do, we taxi swiftly to the end of the runway and spin sharply around, the engines spool rapidly and noisily to full power during the turn and we surge off down the runway, pressed back into our seats with an acceleration most uncharacteristic of a laden 146. An hour and fifty later we touch down in Perth and back to the hustle and bustle of the big city, all seemingly like a different world to where we've just been.