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Published: January 3rd 2009
Karijini National Park - amazing!
Junction Pool Lookout - up in the Gods! We moved on from the Kimberleys to the Pilbara region on 24 November. Like the Kimberleys, this region is characterised by its huge vastness, long empty roads and areas of vibrant scenery - the colours!! Magnificent ranges in different hues, rich red earth and bright blue skies. Stopped overnight at Eighty Mile Beach, which was pleasantly cool with the seabreeze. The beach is a great place to meander as there are a huge variety of shells of all shapes and colours - unfortunately we can’t take them back to NZ! It was turtle nesting time of year and at dusk, we were lucky to be able to watch mother turtle make her way out of the water to the sand dunes, where she proceeded to go through the nesting process. This consists of digging a large hole in the sand first before burrowing down and laying numerous eggs, then burying them with sand, before returning to the water. It was fascinating stuff!
From here we drove to Port Hedland, a huge industrial mining port. We counted 8 ore carriers waiting out at sea - there are several ships a day arriving and leaving the port, taking iron ore to China.
A lot of it comes in on long trains from the inland mining towns , apparently the longest train so far was 7 km! Port Hedland is not particularly exciting or scenic, although the town looks much nicer at night as the lights from the port area light up the whole horizon.
Our next few days were spent in and around the fabulous Karijini National Park. We rated this park as the best we have seen in Australia. And it must be a geologist's dream - so many different kinds of rock and heaps of evidence of the huge upheavals the earth must have gone through in previous ages. On our first day there, we stayed at the Auski Roadhouse and visited Hamersley Gorge, which has the most amazing seams of different coloured rock and a nice swimming hole. We went out to the Wittenoom Gorge on the way back, which is an interesting place. Wittenoom was a mining town until the 1960s when they discovered that blue asbestos is very dangerous to your health, and the mine was closed down. Naturally the town became a ghost town very quickly, as people were encouraged to move away by the
Government. I think it now has a population of two! You can see the remains of the old mining settlement out at the gorge, and you can also pick up blue asbestos chips off the ground still (if you want to!). The scenery out there is great, river gorges and red cliffs. And we drove all the way to Hamersley and back (about a 200km return trip) without meeting another car on the road!
The next day we moved camp to Dales Gorge in the national park itself, no power but a nice camping area with toilets and BBQs. We called into the visitors centre which was impressive, then went off to explore the gorge. We did a great walk down into the gorge to Circular Pool, then along the base of the gorge to Fortescue Falls and Fern Pool. The pools were all beautiful for swimming, deep clear water surrounded by greenery. The colour contrasts in the gorge were stunning - orange-red cliffs against the greenery, and there was water in all the creeks and pools (not always the case in Australia!). At times the walk was quite challenging, as we had to negotiate across water and rocks,
but it was lots of fun.
We set off early the next day to the other main part of Karijini, the Weano Gorge area. The walks in Karijini are all graded from Level 1 to 5, and we managed all but 2 areas of the Weano and Hancock Gorge walks - didn’t go right down to the “Handrail Pool” as you had to walk over slippery rocks and climb down with the aid of a handrail only - and we stopped just short of the “Spider Walk”, this one you had to straddle a very narrow part of the gorge which was wet and slippery - decided we were too close to the end of our trip to risk it ending in tears, or broken bones! Again, it was fun and a bit of a challenge - we swam through one part of the gorge instead of walking along the side on the slippery rock. All of the gorges in the park are spectacular - but we have never seen anything like the views down from the Oxer and Junction Pool lookouts - they are over 100 metres above the rivers and the view is just amazing (see photos!).
This is hard work!
Mother turtle making her way up 80 mile beach to lay her eggs at dusk There are also views to die for over the Joffre Falls and Knox Gorge. Altogether one of the highlights of our trip.
Our next stop was Tom Price which is a well known mining town in the Pilbara. The town is owned by Rio Tinto and exists solely to house and service the iron ore mines just out of the township. There is also housing out at the mines catering for the fly in/fly out staff who live in other places, like Perth.
We met a very interesting woman in the shopping centre who was actually born in Tom Price. This is pretty unusual - her son was the first 3rd generation baby born there, and he is now an apprentice in the town, and her Dad was the first person to have his ashes scattered up at the mine. We also found out that due to the financial downturn, the mine is closing down over Christmas for 2 weeks, the first time this has happened in the 40+ year history of the mine.
Anyway, we had a couple of nights at Tom Price - it was pretty hot so we didn’t do a lot. I discovered
that it definitely is a good idea to flush the loo before using it just in case - all those weeks of doing it suddenly paid off - when a wee frog came whooshing down from under the rim - really makes those old loo cleaning ads seem very real! We took the 4WD track up to the top of Mt Nameless to check out the spectacular 360 degree view over the mine site and the surrounding countryside. We were hoping to do a mine tour but they didn’t have enough people to run it Sunday or Monday and we decided not to wait around as there was no guarantee it would go the next day either. So we set off for Exmouth and ended up driving right through in the one day despite a late start. Some people have commented that we seemed to move quite quickly through WA - this is because there are long distances between towns/ scenic attractions - on the 600k from Tom Price to Exmouth there is one small mining town and a roadhouse - and that’s it! Lots of nice mountain ranges though!
So we left the Pilbara behind and set out
to explore a whole new area of WA - the Coral Coast.
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