Karatha to 80 Mile beach

May 3-4, 2008 Karratha to 89 Mile Beach Western Australia
Well here we are again; reporting to you on the wonders of this amazing country and the fantastic adventures we continue to have. We left Karratha on Saturday mid-day and headed to 80 Mile Beach the only place we could really see on the atlas that we could possible camp and break up the 680km/450m drive to Broome. It was another interesting day, driving through a desert like area, somewhat reminiscent of driving through our southwest region of the states. This Pilbara Region has some of the oldest geological rock formations and life forms. These formations were created billions of years ago when the land mass was the ocean floor. As you are driving you will go for miles where the scenery is flat with some green low growing plants, then the next minute you see in the distance these up thrusting of rocks that seem to just come out of nowhere, and you then will drive for a few miles looking from left to right and back again at these colorful red rock formations. It is amazing the number of miles we have driven and I can honestly say it has never been boring. We stopped mid afternoon in Port Headland. It is a big mining town and we took a quick “drive by” so we could say we had seen it. It is a major mining area. In the 1960s the production of the locally mined iron ore saw the population boom from 1,200 to the 15,000+ that live there now They also have a large solar salt facility where we saw huge mounds of Dampier Salt that are sent all over the world for industrial use. The most interesting thing that we saw was the incredible infrastructure of transportation that they have to move all of the products that they have to ship. Port Headland is one of the biggest ports on the East Coast. It set the record for the longest train 7.35km/5miles; it had 8 locomotives and 682 cars. Boy one sure would have not wanted to get stuck at the train crossing when that was passing. Next year they hope to make the train unmanned and totally computer controlled. We are definitely back up into the warm climate, as the thermometer on the Maui said it was 40c – or about 110 F. Now I am not sure it was quite that hot, but it was definitely VERY WARM! Driving along the highway there are no towns and minimal services, so for fuel on Saturday afternoon we drove about 10 miles up a dirt road to the Pardoo Station. This was a cattle station that also had 2 fuel pumps, a little connivance store and few camping sites. It was really quite a pretty little sight. We might have stayed there if we hadn’t had our eyes on 80 Mile Beach. We pulled into the caravan park at 80 Mile Beach at about 5:00pm. We parked the rig and ran up the road to catch the sunset on this amazingly long, beautiful and very un-crowded beach. What a wonderful end to a day. You might take notice of the picture of the "road train", these are huge in every way.
Sunday we took the day off. We had really planned that we would do this every 3 or 4 days, but we seem to find so much that we want to do and see. We spent the day walking along the beach collecting an incredible variety of shells. It will be a feat if we are able to get them all home. On our morning walk we saw a dozen or so surf fishermen for as far as we could see. They weren’t catching much but one could hardly beat the view. We enjoyed a social time with a few of the other campers. They were Australians about our age, and for the most part were on 12 month or more “drive-arounds” of their own country. It was interesting listening to them tell about the places they had been. Really made it hard on us to think we weren’t going to get too many of the places they were talking about. We were very relaxed and enjoyed our day being beach bums. Tomorrow is our last day in the little caravan, hard to believe that we will have made it from Cairns to Broome, some 12,000 K, or 8,000 miles.