Week 20 To Exmouth

Week 20




Back Toward the Coast

Awakening to a beautiful morning on the top of the world was a classic traveler’s dream.

The rest area was a great roomy camp where everyone could be in their own private haven. Staying here is definitely a recharge for our weary bones.

We headed on to Tom Price to stock up and head toward the coast. Tom Price is still green and well cared for. Birds in the caravan park are so tame they land all over you if you have food to share. The park also has entertainers, so Brian has been humming to some of his favourite songs sung by the free band the last two nights. They were good too.

The one big mistake we made was to play golf. The trouble we had finding the entry to the course should have been a warning. It was the worst game of golf we have ever played – end of story.

Paraburdoo is the next town from Tom Price. Brian was offered a ob here in the 70’s but his other half wasn’t interested in that lifestyle, so it was a no show. You can’t help but wonder how different life may have been, if…… At the shopping center carpark a truck was parked, back open, with a long line of people standing, waiting. Most had prams. What was going on? Antenatal clinic? Lifeline? Chest x-rays? No, the weekly fish truck.

The next few days were leisurely. We stopped at the Beasley River Rest Area, sharing with half a dozen others. The following camp, the Barradale Rest Area at Yannarie River, we shared with at least a hundred other vans, albeit spread out over a huge area. We have learnt not to get too excited about river stays. There is never any water, or if there is it is only a stagnant pool. With the roadside flood warnings we can only imagine the wet season is a different story.

We are headed toward Exmouth. More than a hundred kilometers away, the rolling low hills that look like waves frozen in time and the gnarled stunted trees littering the red plains like western bonsai gives way to low coastal heath. The landscape would do Holland proud. Low nothing as far as the eye can see and further again.

On the other side of the peninsula from Exmouth is the Cape Range National Park. There is a procedure for securing a site entailing an early rise, about 4:00am to wait at the entrance and hope for a site, on a beggars can’t be choosers scenario. We opt instead to book into Yardie Creek Homestead for the next four days and travel in to the park from there. We already have a parks pass so we don’t have a daily entrance fee.

Margaret and Chris have returned to spend a few more days here, camped by the fringe of the reef. They must be better at early rises than we are.

Our explorations here will be for the next web posting. After a few days here we will be heading toward Carnarvon, inexorably south.

Good luck to all the dancers back home who will be doing medals and cheers to everyone else . Here’s hoping the new blog address will cooperate long into the future.

Bye for now

The Nomads

Marble Bar Week 19

Week 19


Marble Bar

We arrive in Marble Bar early and late enough to get a good spot in the caravan park. Someone had just left a spot big enough for us to get in easily, but not early enough for the people in front of us to be so lucky. Surprising what captures your attention on a moving day. The park is full, so I’m glad we have space as we didn’t book (my suggestion – thank the lucky stars it worked out to save the “I told you so!”)

Driving down to the marble bar and Chinaman’s pool, we find it isn’t actually marble, but Jasper that was mistaken for marble. All the same it is impressive.

You feel as if you are walking over the floor of a confectioner’s shop littered with discarded attempts at boiled lollies, red, white and blue.

The second impressive thing is the power plant here at marble Bar. There is a huge array of solar panels and a back up supply of diesel, but the solar panels are inspiring. Hard to get a photo through or aver the security fences, but worth a look-see.

This one is for Tom. Brian spotted a Native Senna, Senna pleurocurpa var angustifolia, uncommon in these parts, but very “notice me” in full bloom. Yellow seems to be the dominant flower colour in the Pilbara, so they do have to work hard to stand out.

Our second day in Marble Bar, golf clubs ousted to avoid rattles, Merv ensconced in the middle half seat, we set off to explore Marble Bar and environs. Helen had decided not to stay in the park, so she went to fix her tyre and then find a spot to camp. There was no luck with the tyre and she has to cross her fingers back to Port Headland that she doesn’t have another flat. We then saw her at Chinaman’s Pool, a nice grassy area beside the river close to Marble Bar itself. We hoped she would stay here, but it wasn’t to be.

Trial one of the day for us was discovering the camera battery was flat. What a disaster. To take a picture we had to eject the battery, restart, take a picture and then repeat the process for each shot. Consequently we headed home to charge for half an hour so when we traveled further afield, we would have shots. It was thus we saw Helen at the phone booth making a call, no longer at Chinaman’s pool, so a sense of disquiet entered our minds, but there was naught we could do to change her mind, set on heading back the track to Doolena, a camp about 50kms away.

Recharged, our trio headed out to jasper bar, an area where you can take stones. It is easy to see why. There is nothing here unless you are a rabid collector, know what you are looking for and have lots of persistence.

The Comet Gold mine is our next stop. The mine does not have tours, but you can get a feel for the ambience and the history of it all. It was interesting to learn that here was actually Marble Bar’s original power supply, a far cry from the solar array now functioning.

The great plan then was to drive 32km to the Glen Herring Gorge, entailing some 4wheel driving. It was all plain sailing till the signposted turn. ( Just had two Freudian spelling blips getting this far – sinposted and sinepotted ) Should give a clue to the next few bumpy hours! There came to be a serious shortage of signs and many crossroads. Merv noticed some blue ribbons tied to bushes so we took their lead, but eventually this strategy led us far from gorges and onto some lesser used, far more rocky and overgrown tracks. (I digress here to tell you most people have renamed this the Red Herring Gorge because nobody finds it.)

Eventually we gave up this endeavour and backtracked. Brian still had one more go in his harried brain, this time with success. The gorge isn’t like the marble bar, or like the Karijini Gorges, but still interesting in the formations and the colours. How did each section get to be like this and how did those smooth plates of rock become so water moulded in this hot dry landscape?

The boys saw skull cave in the cliffs above and “phantomised” about their comic reading childhoods.

Returning to grand civilization, we met the first vehicle we had seen since the Comet Mine. Let this be a lesson to unprepared travelers. They were looking for a prospecting site we hadn’t heard of and which wasn’t on our map. They begged for the mud tourist map we did have. Feeling their need was greater than ours, we passed it over, even though they wouldn’t be greatly helped by it.

Arriving back at the vanpark, we set to cooking the roast for the night, when Merv came over waving a sheet of paper. Helen was bogged at Doolena and was needing help. We didn’t have tow ropes or straps and our one car would not be enough to get that heavy motorhome out of trouble, so Merv and Brian headed to the SES at the Marble Bar council chambers to arrange some help. They will be headed out in the morning to help.

Merv became a knight in shining armour, packed up and drove out to the gorge so Helen would not be alone. We now have leftovers.

Next morning Brian and I headed out to see if Helen was out of trouble. Meet Reg, the poor guy on a day off who Helen mistook for the SES and waved him over to get her out of her sand bog. We arrived to find Reg and Merv busily shoring up under the wheels with rocks and jacks trying to stop the motorhome sinking any further. Helen did have a large tow rope, so she was prepared, but just disobeyed the cardinal rule to stay on the hard tracks.

Eventually the team got the van out and everyone went their own way. Reg offered to take Helen’s tyre into Port Headland so it would be fixed when she got there tomorrow. He was a stranger, but a friendly one, just the sort of help you need in remote places. We were off to Coppin’s Gap, luckily the turn off not far from here anyway. It was a lot easier to find than Glen Herring, despite the inevitable un-signposted crossroads. The gap was very visible.

Here there is more evidence of tectonic movement and lovely red and orange in the twisted rock. There is still water in here, but it must be an impressive sight in flood. The drive is scenic in an outback way. The sky has broad sweeps of cloud with a scud collected on the horizon, waiting to be swept over the stoop into the nether lands.

Merv was back at the Marble Bar park, freshly showered and feeling a bit better. Even Sabre and Sasha were preened and bathed and looked pretty good. We had a shared spaghetti feast, ready for moving day tomorrow.

Our plan was to shop in Port Headland and head out to Indee Station, on the way to Karijini. Everytime we stop in a town, the visa card gets a hammering, but I suppose we have to eat, drink and stay well. We also have to keep on the move. We are not sure if Merv is going ahead with the plan to head into Karijini with us while Helen minds the dogs. Since Indee Station we are out of service, so he’ll just have to catch up if we are still on plan A. He is feeling a bit homesick at the moment and is missing his “old life” badly.

To get into Indee Station, there is 9km of dirt, not our favourite thing, but the station has had good reports, so we take the chance. It is a working station and looks it. Bit wild really, with old vehicles and junk everywhere. Workers from Port Headland live here, plus station hands, plus mine workers and surveyors. The tourists are an added extra. The station hosts happy hour daily and provided the venue and the eats, you just bring the eats. $18 for an unpowered site is reasonable. A desert bike race is being held here this weekend, so we will be long gone.

We start our next morning with a drive to Red Rock, or at least an attempted one. We haven’t yet learnt the truth about mud maps , unsignposted intersections, estimated distances and following blue markers in WA. It is all a themed plot to get rid of all the visitors, or to help the fuel industry. Sorry to admit, this red rock “got away”. We did see lots of possible red rocks, but don’t think we found “the” one.

So Thursday then finds us battling our way to Auski Tourist Village, shuddering to think of our fuel consumption because of the roaring crosswinds. By the time we finally arrive we are ready for a break from driving and exploring, so tomorrow will be soon enough.

Our thought today is to explore the Wittenoom Gorge. I have been expecting it to be like the gorges in Karijini, on the other side of the range, but it is more like a history lesson. Here is where Lang Hancock mined Blue Asbestos and the whole area is swept clean of vestiges of human habitation, but not of the slag heap or the asbestos littering the soil.

The mountains, unashamed in their lack of stature on the world stage, stand and watch. They have been here since the dreamtime, have seen the present and will continue on until the present is the second dreaming. They have been ravaged, gnawed and nibbled by relentless heat and winds , as well as by infrequent raging waters, but they still stand resolute. Man’s attempts however have not lasted so well. Concrete causeways laid in the 1960’s have been lifted off stone bases and moved aside as a sheet of paper. It is possible to drive all the way to the settlement where Lang had his mining headquarters in an oasis setting. The last vestiges are concrete and a few bougainvilleas.

There are quite a few campers here, including caravans. If you had an off-roader, or a camper van , here are some delightful spots beside a number of rock pools spattered down the gorge, easy to access in comparison to Karijini.

The presence of the asbestos is the reality check. When I enter technology land again, I need to look up how it is actually formed.

We talk to some campers about the history of the area and to a lone cyclist, German, who is riding his mountain bike filming a journal of his travels. He has ridden from Perth. No thanks.

We continue on a scenic dirt road to the Rio Tinto Gorge, another 50 odd kilometers away from the ghostly Wittenoom. We have followed the range and enjoyed the green powdered ridges, bursting with colour after a splash of rain. Taking a photo is almost a sacrilege because the scale cannot be rendered justice.

The road narrows to a one lane, no passing or overtaking throughway. The gorge sides loom over our heads and we silently pray a road train is not journeying through. This short pass leads us to the Hamersley Gorge on the western end of the National Park. Luckily the rough corrugations are only 5km worth of bone shaking and we are rewarded with a beautiful pool at the bottom of water cascading down the smooth rocks. Brian enjoyed clambering, but I preferred to sit and appreciate the beauty. Too cold to swim.

We enjoyed lunch nearby, despite the fact we had not packed the camp stools. We improvised. It was much better than leaving the billy behind.

So Friday did not turn out as we had imagined. Still we have felt the energy of this land once again and appreciate the tenacity of those who make a life here. As the winds power up even more, the chill factor drives us indoors to the warmth of the van. Happy Hour is blown short. Still no word of Merv. We did try the signal booster aerial, but no joy. We can only imagine he has changed his mind. Happy travels Merv.

Saturday morning finds us viewing Munjina Gorge from Albert Tognolini Rest Area. The highway was built through the gorge and affords stunning views.

Even the foliage is suggesting a winter fire, yellow gold burning the landscape. As we drive we, we drive through a very small window of phone coverage and receive a text from Merv to say he is headed north.

Time on our hands we venture to Karijini again to view Kalamina Gorge. The dirt road is much improved on our last visit a month ago. A grader has been through leaving some rough spots to remind us of our earlier trip, but the effect is dramatic on most of the road. (Sorry Chris and Margaret – we were too early.)

Kalamina Gorge is easy to access. Of course the inevitable stone steps lead down. Right leads to the Kalamina Waterfall, shaded and rocky with a glorious pool below.

The water makes crisscross patterns better than any artist could design.

Turning left leads to a walk down the gorge. We negotiate rock ledges and criss cross over the stream many times.

The walk ends at the Arch Rock Pool. Here to continue on you need to negotiate the cold waters . We pass on this, happy to see the gorge we missed a month ago.

Sunday becomes a rest day, at the Albert Tognolini Rest Area. Brian wants to relax at a free camp for the night and perhaps light a camp fire. The wind is a bit erratic so I’m not sure of that. The booster gives us one bar on our internet, not enough to connect so apologies once again for a late posting. Hope you all have time to read the blog this week.

Cheers to you all

reflective wait

The happy campers