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Published: August 9th 2012
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Day 36 - Saturday 4
th August – Dampier Peninsula to Cape Keraudren
We packed up in the early morning, filled the trailer with water and left Chile Creek by about 8.30am. None of us were looking forward to the very bumpy corrugated drive back to Broome but it turned out that the grader had done quite a bit of work in the few days we had been on the peninsula and it was much smoother than expected. That meant we arrived in Broome at 11am for a quick pit stop – fuel, a few groceries and coffees. The races are on in Broome today and the place was chockers. People taking an age at the petrol station, loads of people in the supermarket and a huge queue for coffees. After the unsealed road we had to inflate the tyres again for driving on bitumen, which Mark managed to do in the Visitors Centre car park.
Finally at 11.45 we were back on the road again, heading South West towards the mining town of Port Hedland. We needed to cover quite a lot of ground so kept on trucking for most of the afternoon until we arrived at
the Eighty Mile Beach caravan park, about 380km south of Broome. It was late afternoon and we weren’t sure if we would stay at the caravan park or if we would drive further. However first we needed to stretch our legs and check out the beach. The tide was out making the beach appear even more immense. It stretched as far as the eye can see in both directions. The sand was peppered with shells so we had to see what this beach would offer us for our shell collection. Mark was keen to take the car on the beach as it had 4WD access (so much for stretching our legs!) so we drove over the dune onto the sand and went to find a spot to park.
After half an hour of shell collecting we decided to open up the trailer and cook ourselves a spot of early dinner. Spago-saurus (pasta dinosaur shapes in tomato sauce) and instant noodles, washed down by tea, beer and lemon lime bitters. As expected, the sunset was pretty spectacular over the beach and the dunes and we got some more great photos.
The plan was to drive for another hour or
so in the dark to take us a bit further south, so we ventured back onto the Great Northern Highway at dusk. Although dusk is the time when there can be lots of wildlife – large and small – on the roads we encountered nothing that would have made a big mess had it hit the bull bars. The road was empty of cars and animals and the sky around us was turning amazing shades of deep reds, purples, indigos until darkness finally fell. Instead of using a rest area we decided to try to find the camping area at Cape Karaudren, a small promontory on the coast. It was pitch black by the time we finally found ourselves a place to camp. It was quite popular so we had to squeeze ourselves in. As we were putting up the tent we were treated to a large orange full moon rising over what turned out to be the mudflats. We had our own version of the “staircase to the moon” phenomenon that we had missed in Broome, when the full moon sheds a ladder of light over the mud flats at low tide. We were confident we would have some
spectacular views once the sun comes up tomorrow morning.
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