Yes, this blog would be a lot easier to update through mental telepathy. I will have to look into it… As it stands, it is very difficult to update as I travel through some very remote regions here in northwestern Australia. I haven’t seen a traffic light since I left Perth. Many of the places I’ve been camping have no electricity or fresh water. Internet connections seem few and far between. My regular bedtime has been around 7PM every night since there is nothing much else to do after the sun sets and the temperature drops. That being said, the past ten days or so have been fabulous. I’ve been camping for about 12 straight days now and loving it. I sleep really well with all the fresh air.
Thankfully the long boring drive ended in Ocean Reef, and a really beautiful drive started from there up into Exmouth, and then back south and east up into the Pilbara area to the town of Tom Price and Karijini National Park. I can’t say that I was super impressed with Ocean Reef — mainly because it seemed a bit too crowded, over-priced, and expensive. A happy paradise for yuppies, it seemed. The snorkelling was pretty good, but I’ve had better snorkelling on Rottnest Island near Perth.
I went from Coral Bay up to the very northwestern tip of Australia to Exmouth. I ended up camping on a station just outside of the Cape Ranges National Park (since I couldn’t get into a camp ground in the national park during this peak tourist season up here). Exmouth was much warmer that Coral Bay (for some reason, even though it’s really not that far away) and it is full of exotic bird and other wildlife. The park was really nice with gorges you could hike up into during the mornings, and absolutely fantastic snorkelling you could dive into in the warmer afternoons. There were hundreds of species of beautiful big, medium, and tiny fish there, right off the beach. They seemed perfectly comfortable with you swimming amongst them. It was like swimming in some big rich exotic aquarium.
From Exmouth I drove to Tom Price, which was absolutely beautiful. Tom Price (named after an American, incidentally) is a big wealthy mining town in the middle of the Hammersley Ranges. The movie “Japanese Story” was filmed there if you want to check it out. It was about as beautiful a landscape as I’ve ever seen, with dark red soil, white barked trees, and Spinifex grasses that made the mountains look like they had been dusted with light green snow. An absolutely exquisite landscape.
Near Tom Price is a fabulous national park called Karijini that has a similar landscape, but with deep gorges that drop 100 meters into fabulous swimming holes. There were lots of great hiking trails throughout this whole area. The only problem with it was the fine red dust (much like paprika) that got into everything.
Anyway, I’m now in Australia’s largest port (by tonnage): Port Hedland. This is where much of Australia’s mined minerals from the interior get loaded onto boats for Asia. Asside from that, it’s nothing much to write home about. I’m about to head off towards Broome. I like camping on stations and will try to stop at another station on the way there to break up the 500 km trip. There are also supposed to be some nice beach camp sites along the way. Broome is supposed to be very nice, but I’m afraid it may end up as another Coral Bay. Nice if you’re rich!
