By 7:30 am on day 10, we were packed up and moving toward one of the first big attractions in WA for this holiday: The Bungle Bungles. We rove about 2 hours, one of which was spent on a dirt road headed into Purnululu National Park. We registered our camp spot for 2 nights and got the pick of the park to camp in since we arrived at around 10am.
The nice lady in the visitor and registration centre gave us advice on what walks to do and when to do them to get the most of this beautiful land formation. We heeded her advice and set up camp with a bite to eat then headed straight back out again to a walking track named “Echidna Chasm”. The lady had said that between 11:30 am and 1:30 pm the gorge would look very nice indeed. So we headed on over to the walking track and brought our cameras and some water and headed on in.
What awaited us on this walk was vibrant red and orange rock faces, interesting honeycomb like holes in the rock faces and many plants and thin gaps to squeeze through. Throughout the walk I took many pictures of the amazingly high walls of the chasm. Once we reached the end we took a few minutes to soak it all in, it was quite amazing to behold!
Once we did all of this we ventured back to the car to grab some food for afternoon tea. We all were just about finished when my uncle requested we charge one of his batteries on our inverter (for those of you that don’t know, an inverter converts the 12V DC from your car to 240V AC just like a mains outlet). I grabbed the charger and went to plug it in, but before I did, I noticed that the little status lights for the other chargers we have plugged in were not alight. Alright so I checked if the inverter was plugged in, and it was. Uh oh, we have a problem.
Once we made it back to camp I grabbed the inverter from its usual position and took it out to have a better look. First we tried letting it cool off for an hour before plugging it in again, no dice. I ended up just removing the circuit board from the device for a visual inspection, I couldn’t see anything obvious; All of the caps were fine, no burn marks on any tracks or components, and we couldn’t smell any electronic smoke.
This is odd, so we turned it on again and waited to see if anything happened, and it did; a small tail of smoke arose from a pair of load resistors. Ok this is not good obviously we are getting power to that point on the output, but its being grounded or otherwise discharged.
Long story short, one of the FETs was faulty and had shorted the resistors to ground. We took the FET out and now we are going to leave it until we get home to fix that inverter, as we are going to just buy a new one when we get into Broome in a few days.
After all of this we all sat down and had general chit chat until the sun went down and it got cold. The national park does not allow any camp fires, so we had to go without. We had a nice warm dinner and shower and headed off to bed.
Here’s some pictures from the walk, enjoy!
Thanks for reading,
Trav.
