2ND JUNE 2013 – PORT HEDLAND, MID WESTERN AUSTRALIA

A cold 12deg windy wet morning as we set off for Port Hedland. The scenery is beautiful with gigantic clouds of amazing shapes & the road bordered by spinifex with it’s mounded green base & long, straw coloured seed heads. Further along they become orange coloured from the dust all the road trains are spewing out as they drive past. Pulling into a roadhouse for fuel we are faced with long queues of caravans & roadtrains surrounded by a sea of red mushy mess of mud (tongue twister for today). The water just seems to lay on the surface instead of sinking in which is why it floods so easily. Most of these roadtrains have three trailers behind them, laden with equipment bound for the mines. There are more ‘oversized’ vehicles on the road than we have ever seen before & one was so wide that we had to entirely pull off the road & stop till it went past. Western Australia seems to be 90% mining & 10% tourists.

 

One of the many carring iron ore from the mine

 

Waiting for fuel at Roadhouse

 

Amazingly as we venture further we cross several creekbeds, still totally dry & full of young sapling trees which have obviously grown since the last flood. I guess the whole cycle will be repeated & they will all be washed away again. Such is the changing face of this land. The other gruesome sight is cattle who have been hit & the scavengers have cleaned them entirely out leaving just the hide looking like a ‘bag of bones’.

Rain gave us a breather once we reached Port Hedland which was mostly closed due to it being Sunday & long weekend holiday. However we went to purchase milk & bread at a small store which turned out to be like a Kiwi dairy, operated by a Maori woman. She imports lots of Kiwi goodies like Maketu pies, flounder, whitebait, bluff oysters etc for all the kiwis working in the surrounding mines. She was not impressed with the weather & the temperature of 17deg which was too much like NZ weather & most unusual for this time of year. The normal would be 25deg. Back on the road there are loads of mining vehicles driving toward us again – everything about Port Hedland is mining orientated – it is so ‘in your face’..

The rain caught up with us again by the time we found our overnighter which was situated beside a large river (yes, with water in it). There must have been about 50 vans parked & it was fairly muddy. By the next morning with all night rain, it was even worse & a couple of motorhomes got stuck. Some people decided they were going to stay put but we decided it may get better as we headed further north so took our leave. We had to rethink our options as many of the dirt roads we intended to travel on were closed. There were vans coming out of them which seemed to have had a very bad paint job as they were now red instead of white. With a shortage of water in these parts I don’t know how they would get them cleaned up again. We did see one poor couple in a roadside area trying to clean theirs with little success. The GPS at this stage is showing a totally straight line in the middle of nothing. About the only thing we see is a couple of very large birds in the middle of the road which I identify as Bustards (correct spelling), and some Brahmen cattle with their humpbacks & enormous saggy folds of flesh hanging under their chins. Do hope mine doesn’t reach that stage!!! The wind is now against us as well so we are chewing up fuel like a sponge soaks up water. Funnily enough the fuel is easier to get than good water. On reaching our next overnighter we had a good respite from the rain & had time to wander around watching birds & making phone calls to book a caravan park in Broome while we had a signal. Unfortunately it rained heavily again during the night so left for Broome at 7.30am, in two hours of heavy rain. The peak season starts here from June 1st & Broome is very expensive, $42-$52+ per site per night, so we changed our plans & decided to just spend the day there. It’s a bad start to their season, especially those little places off the main route on closed roads.