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Great Northern Highway
This is what the highway looks like!Well we are officially heading towards home from today. A little way off but heading in that direction now, south... But south or not it's still damn hot! We are camping without power tonight so its pretty obvious how hot it is!
After an unrushed start we said goodbye to Broome. Our neighbours across the patch waved us off. That was an amazing family, a youngish couple with 6 kids and one on the way! They were camping too, one ordinary looking tent is all they had. A real contrast on some of the setups we saw, they were definitely roughing it! The eldest looked about 12 and one every 2 years after. Lovely family too. Very unusual these days!
The road from Broome is the Great Northern Highway. There's not much happening, though, just a lot of red dirt and straight long highways. I did start to see a lot of wild flowers and the bush changed from very sparse to tallish shrubs to back again. But it seems this end of the state is much the same. The highway hugs the coast but you cant really acccess it much at all. You only know its there because
The Great Northern Highway
Our morning brew stop, hot as! the map tells you it is! There are the odd camping spots indicated on the coast but its all dirt road access.
After a couple of hours we stopped at a roadside stop for a cuppa. Very few roadhouses out here either. But there was a lovely breeze flowing through the Bago door so that was nice.Aafter a few days away from driving, it takes us a little while to settle into the routine of long drives again!
Back on the road, again, we saw two very large cows that had been killed. Wonder what the car looked like! Nasty that one.
The first roadhouse we came upon was the Sandfire roadhouse, a pretty bleak looking place. It advertises itself as,where the Great Sandy desert meets the sea! Couldnt see much ocean there! Still some nice toasted sangas and a pleasant English back packer working there, so that was nice. Very expensive deisel but no point whinging out here, you just have to pay.
We finally came upon a road that ran into the 80mile beach. Its a famous beach (obviously goes for 80 miles) and the road was red dirt. But we gave it a
shot because by all accounts its a magnificent beach. It was pretty corrugated but we managed to get to the coast without any damage. Only 7k's in after all. Wow this is a beautiful place! As most beaches up this end it has a massive tidal range. The tide was only half way out but still meant the beach was very wide. And shells! everywhere, and shapes we'd never seen before! And amazing broken off pieces of what may be coral, but we really weren't sure! We collected some shells to bring home, they were so unusual! It was such a very lovely place. We were only walking for a half an hour and the water was receeding at an incredible rate. I would think that the beach would be 800 metres wide by low tide at a guess! There is a caravan park there but we wanted to get on the road so didnt stay. But it was definitely worth the detour! Stunning yet again!
It was getting a little late once back on the highway so we ran out of free camp choices. The sun sets very quickly here, no real dusk. So we got to Paardoo
80 mile beach
The red dirt road into the beach - not designed for Bago's but he did a great job roadhouse and propped. Its very basic camp site, but we are safe and we were met by Billy (an old Englishman) and his dog and shown where to park. Its amazing though, there's actual grass here! Couldn't believe our eyes! They must have a bore somewere to water the red dirt. But the rest of the place is pretty low brow, but its ok for the night.
The sun was just setting and the colours were amazing. The Kimberley region is really stunning, the red dirt is super red, deep deep red, the blue sky is incredibly blue and when you have green grass its a site to behold!
Well not quite sure where tomorrow will take us, but we are mainly keen to get to Exmouth and then really start seeing even more spectacular WA sites! Stay warm!
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