Port Hedland and scary bush fire

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Left karijini early in the morning and drove 300km to Port Hedland, the town itself is a mining and port town, so besides these two things, there are not many things to see... The majority of the iron oresmined in western Australia get transported either by road trains or by rail from the mines to Port Hedland for loading onto massive iron ore bulk carrying ships for export overseas... During February through to November (don't quote me on that though), you can take a tour of the BHP iron ore processing plant and watch the minerals been loaded onto massives ships, costs about $20 per person... Again if mining is your thing, otherwise, have a walk along the marina and check out the ships... So yeah, Port Hedland is rather boring, probably only worth a few hour stop over for petrol and food...

If you are driving, the traffic in and out of Port Hedland is congested with road trains and mining vehicles and there are lots of small rocks and dusts on the road, so drive slowly.

We stayed at Port Hedland just for few hours, fuelled up and decided to head for broome... which is 600km away... Made a stop over at a road house in the middle of nowhere to fuel up, saw 2 peacocks chasing each other around in the parking lot, then one decided to do some showing off, we were very impressed.

About 30km past the road house, we got caught in a massive bush fire, apparantly the fire had been raging for days and had jumped across the road a few times, pretty scary stuff... No one told us about the bush fire, so we pulled over on the side of the road, then cars behind us stopped along the side of the road as well, all in all, within 10 minues of waiting around we had 30 cars... The decision was made to drive through the bush fire zone, was so scary, because all it takes is for one car to have a punctured tyre to block the road and then we are all screwed... but we made through in one piece... Not sure if driving through a wild bush fire was the smartest thing to do, any suggestion?

Arrived Broome around 8pm, paid camp sites in Broome is really expensive, $45 just to have our car there, too much for backpackers' budget... we ended up finding this rest area 20km North of Broome... It is free, but had no toilets or running water and the surround bush looked really creepy, maybe it is the hot humid weather playing tricks with our imaginations... We parked our campervan there and slepted in the car for 2 of the nights in Broome, nothing happened to us, so if you guys are after a free site to park and sleep in your car, this would be place to go...

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Photos

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Port Hedland Marina

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Iron ore ships

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Town center

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Bush fire

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We didn't know what to do...