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Australian domestic travel I gone and dun

Gazza

Giga Poster
I've done plenty of overseas trips, helped by the fact that my sister lives in the US (And even Mum and Dad were working over there for a few years),
but I do like exploring domestically.

In 2019 I turned 30 and realised that I had still yet to set foot in Tasmania or the Northern Territory.
I had visited Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory Previously, had lived in South Australia, Victoria and Queensland, and lived within a short distance of New South Wales on two non consecutive occasions, so plenty of travel around those places...sorta.

Anyhow, during 2019 I did a 10 day trip down to Tasmania, visiting the capital of Hobart and most parts of the state.

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And also and a long weekend in the Northern Territory later in the year, mostly spent in the capital of Darwin and surrounds.

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With those out of the way, every state and every capital visited, I started thinking that it could be entirely possible to actually visit every substantial settlement in Australia (And some other cool places too)

So what constitutes a substantial settlement? I'd say one big enough to have a McDonalds, which typically might be around the 7000 person mark.
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Or big enough to have a Coles or Woolworths, which tend to be around the 4000 person mark.

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You can sort of see they both roughly correlate to where people mostly live here.

So with the goal defined then I started thinking, what are the actual broad regions of Australia I hadn't seen either, and devised myself a bit of a hit list to bring it all together.

-Outback Queensland and Northern Territory
-The Northern Parts of South Australia
-The Central West of New South Wales
-South Western Victoria
-The Nullarbor

The biggie is the Outback trip and quite frankly I felt visiting Uluru was the most fundamental Australian place I hadn't been to.

In 2019 I had managed trips to both the US and Japan, so I had resolved to not go overseas in 2020, and to finally do the outback instead.

I mapped out a trip....
-West from Brisbane to Roma
-North to Longreach for the Qantas museum
-To Winton for the dinosaur trackways,
-West to Mt Isa home of one of the worlds biggest mines
- Across the Barkly tablelands to Tennant Creek and the Devils Marbles
-Down to Alice Springs, the town in the middle of the country
- Then Uluru and Kings Canyon
-South to Coober Pedy, a town where everyone lives underground
-To Port Augusta, the crossroads of the south
-East to Broken Hill, a famous outback town featured in Priscilla Queen of the Desert
-And finally straight shooting across New South Wales back home to Brisbane.

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As destiny would have it, nobody would be going overseas anyway in 2020, and I felt rather smug that I didn't have to cancel any expensive overseas flights.

However this excitement was short lived. I had planned my trip for Easter onwards, but the Northern Territory closed their borders, and Queensland closed to New South Wales, making it impossible. I deferred until August.
Things had been calm for a couple of months, but another outbreak in NSW meant Queensland closed entry from there off, and as you can see from the map, there is no direct highway link from South Australia to Queensland (Unless you have a 4x4 to tackle the Oodnadatta Track).

I didn't feel like cancelling again, so I reshaped it, chopping off Coober Pedy, Port Augusta and Broken Hill, and instead doing a huge back track, and visiting a friend in Townsville instead:

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The trip was a success, but for now I'll do the one that is most fresh in my mind...The N.W. of Western Australia.....
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Hixee

Flojector
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Epic - in almost every sense of the word.

That drive makes most of anything else you ever come across (even for those pesky yanks who cover far more miles than us Europeans generally do by car) seem frankly amateur, and well - the scenery isn't half bad either.

Pretty basic you're not leaving your home country, though. ;)
 

Gazza

Giga Poster
So, I'll get started on the North West of Western Australia.

Previously I've been to Perth and the Southwest, so I've got my Eurofighter cred from Adventure World and seen some nice places such as Margaret River, Albany and Esperance.

The North West is a much bigger beast, encompassing a region over 1000km long.
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You'll notice a place called Broome up the top, absolutely would have gone there, but with everyone holidaying locally, the place was booked out, hyper expensive and no spots available on tours to horizontal falls for my dates, so I opted to leave it for another time.

Instead did a loop up the coast via Geraldton, Kalbarri, Carnarvon, Coral Bay and Exmouth, across to Karratha and Pt Hedland, and then back south via the other highway, visiting Tom Price, Karijini and Newman.

So I started with a weekend in Perth....I've been there before, but since I was there last they have built an enormous state museum (Ooooh, we have a Rem Koolhaus building in Aus now!)
The place was enormous, and actually a bit odd to navigate (Backtracking necessary)
Highlight was probably the big collection of minerals from the mining industry there, and the liberal use of projection mapping.
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And I got some waterslide creds at a local pool. The blue trap door slide was closed.
My first go at a Polin Space Shuttle but to be honest it was pretty sedate.
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The next day I hit the road north on the Indian Ocean Drive.

Lancelin was the first stop, which is a small coastal down with some huge sand dunes you can slide down.
You can hire sand boards from the local mini mart.
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Heading further north was the Pinnacles. A collection of limestone columns in the middle of nowhere you can wander around in. In Perth you can do a day trip out to these, but they are like 2 hours away and probably not worth it for a day trip, but def worth a look if on the way north.....In other words it's interesting, but you'll have had your fill after an hour. At times with strong shadows, and at sunset it absolutely would be a photographers delight.
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There are heaps of lookouts on the way, so it's very easy to burn a fair bit of time making a lot of stops, but it is very pleasant.
The town of Cervantes near the pinnacles has a lake with Stromatolites.
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The day actually got away from me fairly quickly.
My accommodation for the night was in Geraldton, but the last main place I stopped along the way was Jurien Bay, the quintessential "sleepy coastal town" that basically exists for holidaymakers and retirees.
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So that's the first 3 days done......
 

cocoa

Mega Poster
so nice! my gf has been bugging me to do something similar recently...

(i want to wait until orange fire and wooden leviathan are open first tho lol)
 

Gazza

Giga Poster
I neglected to mention my stop in Dongara, which was busy having it's main street ripped up.
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The town is also home to "the big crayfish", but in terms of the big things you can see in Australia, it was rather small IMO.
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Heading north my stop for the evening was Geraldton.
I had a wander around the town center and dined at the westernmost McDonalds in Australia, completing my set of cardinal points (Ballina NSW, Casurina NT and Kingston TAS being the others).
They had done some interesting stuff, with quite a large number of murals, and an old department store that had been hollowed out and turned into an undercover public space. Another old building which had been burnt down had been revived as a modern shade structure built of timber battens.
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It's a port town of about 40,000 clinging onto some scrubby coastline. I had a good look around till about lunchtime the following day.
It actually had quite a few nice old buildings, a good water front promenade and a couple of other interesting sites such as a museum, missionary style cathedral and a memorial to a WW2 ship which went down.
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The museum had a bit of info on Dutch East India company ships which went down off the WA coast, which I wasn't ever aware of.
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Anyhow, after a final stop at the town lookout it was on the road again.
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Gazza

Giga Poster
Heading north I passed through Northampton which had just been hit by a cyclone a couple of weeks prior and the damage was clear to see. Trees missing leaves, billboards blown over, houses missing roofs. The bakery was open so I grabbed a sausage roll before pressing on.
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Getting off the main highway, I made a beeline for Kalbarri, though on the way made a stop at the Pink Lake:
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Hehehe:
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Approaching Kalbarri are a series of clifftops you can walk along. I probably should have allowed more time for this bit, and to be fair it's "near" enough to Perth to make a return visit.
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Kalbarri, also pretty wrecked and damaged, with local streets limited to residents only.
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I pressed on to the main target of the day....Murchison Gorge!

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This place needs to be on every tourist brochure. It's up there with the opera house and Uluru IMO, but the crazy thing is I hadn't heard of it till a few weeks before my trip. The pics don't capture the vastness of it.
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In 2020 they built a pair of skywalks similar to the one at the Grand Canyon, albeit without a glass floor.
If you jumped around you could get the thing to shake a bit.

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Another landmark at Murchison Gorge is natures window, a hole in a rock that frames a nice view.
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I concluded the day with a trek down to Z bend, where I saw an echidna in the wild.
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And camped out at a roadhouse for the night.
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Hixee

Flojector
Staff member
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Well, Murchison Gorge just got added to the bucket list. Wow!
 

cocoa

Mega Poster
yeah it looks great. I'm a bit sick of the neverending eucalypt forests in my half of australia so its nice to see we actually do in fact have other kinds of geography in this giant continent :p
 

Gazza

Giga Poster
^Indeed. The drive from Newcastle to Taree makes you want to stab yourself in the eye because it's just endless Eucalypts for 2h...

The next day on the road was a fairly long one, covering 500km to Coral Bay.

I made a decision to skip over the Shark Bay area, with Denham being a 150km deviation.
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I did check out Hamelin Pool, which was only 30km off the highway. It was another collection of stromatolites, but what made it amazing was the way the stillness of the water combined with the morning mist to make it seem like they were floating in thin air.
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The landscape continued to change...

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The next town along is Carnarvon. It definitely starts to feel a bit more remote when you get out here, and certainly more humid!
Around 4000 people, it mostly exists for a strip of intensive food growing that occurs around the mouth of the Gasycoyne River, it was home to a NASA tracking station you can still visit too. Has all the trimmings you would expect from the only significant town for a distance of several hundred kilometers.
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The space museum was "alright" but a bit of a mess in terms of presentation. Some parts looked very kiddy, though other parts like the recreation of a lounge room during the lunar landing and all the preserved nasa equipment was pretty cool!
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A 'Sugar scoop' antenna
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This thing was laughably bad. You basically just lay on your back and watched a video montage of the Saturn V launch. No movement or anything:

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I spent a few hours looking around town before hitting the road north, crossing the Gasycoyne and passing through the fruit fields on the way out:
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I did have to stop and get a pic of this 😁
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Approaching Coral bay you pass into the tropic of Capricorn, which means termite mounds start appearing everywhere:
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I rocked into Coral bay just before sunset, and could already tell it was a little slice of heaven....More on Coral bay in the next instalment
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Gazza

Giga Poster
So, Coral bay adjoins a section of the Ningaloo Reef.
There is a small settlement that pretty much just supports the campgrounds / accommodation units and a handful of holiday homes.
Self sufficient with wind turbines and gensets, and you can only drink water from certain taps (made the mistake of having a mouthful of bore water when brushing my teeth...yuk)
The place was paaaaaacked!
I had to camp in an overflow area and even then it was still $50 for the site.
A couple of nice relaxed looking venues to dine at, but I had already stocked up on groceries back in Carnarvon.
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I got up fairly early for a morning stroll.
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By the time 9am rolled around It was time for my glass bottom boat tour.
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This was my first time on a glass bottom boat, and snorkelling .
The boat itself is moderately interesting but it doesnt compare to the colour and thousands of fish down there.
Spectacular.
But I wasnt quite prepared for the small amounts of salt water you inevitably swallow, which was rather burny and unpleasant.
Highly recommended anyway
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There's not a whole lot to do in Coral bay other than fishing boating and snorkelling. There are other full day tours you can do to other nearby wildlife colonies but i opted to hit the road from:
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To:
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Just 100km away

After a short while there, Exmouth immediately became one of my favourite towns in Australia.
Located at the tip of the NW Cape, it started off as a US Navy Radio station.
So it's isolated location at "the end of the road" gives it a great vibe, everyone is there to get away from it all and have fun outdoors.
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And I guess other people love the place too. Was booked out, and literally the only bed in town I could get was at a backpackers.
The town center had a microbrewery, a few nice restaurants, i definitely didn't feel like a place you'd slum it.
Very well kept, and it seems like the house prices are sky high too.
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(Turns out these guys are endemic, big Pixar short vibes)
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The town had clearly got its share of 'Royalties for Regions' funding with a new Ningaloo Reef center.
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Creatures from the local cave system
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A moderately sized aquarium
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And some good local history on the mixed American Australian community due to the radio base
(Eventually the base was handed over to Australia and the americans left, but by that point the town was established as a destination in its own right.

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also a simulator of Cyclone Vance which hit the town in the 90s and was the fastest wind speed ever recorded in Aus.
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I spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around town.
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The next day....Cape Range National Park......
 
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Gazza

Giga Poster
^Despite the long distances, it can be quite easy smashing out long drives due to low traffic volumes and fairly easy roads.

Next day I explored the Cape Range National Park.
The peninsular Exmouth is on has a mountain range in the middle, so you have to drive up and around the tip to see the gorges, the rest of Ningaloo reef etc.
Ends up being about 70km of driving from memory to get up and around from the town to the bottom of the national park.
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I started the morning at Yardie Creek, with a fairly straightfoward walk to the top of a gorge.
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Fossilised millipede
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There are plenty of side gorges to explore, some of which need a 4x4. One of which is Pligonoman Gorge, which is home to a community of wild rock wallabies:
If you stay still and dead silent for a couple of minutes they soon start popping their heads up:

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I went for a couple of snorkels.
Oyster stacks was a bit rough, and was full of Jellyfish, which were a dark maroon colour, so you could easily spot them but it made it a bit stressful having to always be on the lookout.
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Turquoise bay was much more pleasant. You can drift snorkel there by just floating with the ocean current.
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You can see all the dead ones
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For lunch I actually headed back into town and had a huge burger at whatever the microbrewery was, and a bit of a closer look at the naval radio station:
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Vlamingh Head Lighthouse offered spectacular views of the cape and really made it hit home how isolated you are.
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Up at the top of the cape is the wreck of the Mildura, a cattle ship:
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With the last bit of daylight I went down into Shothole gorge, which is just north of the town. It's a amazing they dont make more of a big deal of it because it was lovely.
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The next morning I hit the road further east, but it seemed I had saved some of the best for last. A local told me about another road and lookout that goes to the top of the gorge, and, well, I'll let the pics do the talking. Exmouth is one of the best place in Australia I reckon, hope I can go back in the future and spend more time.
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Gazza

Giga Poster
Heading east from Exmouth it was into the Pilbara for my next stop of Karratha.

The scenery begins to shift. You see massive red boulders everywhere. Due to recent rains it was like a green savannah.
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@Pokemaniac might draw comparisons with Stavanger, albeit smaller population. Offshore gas and iron ore. On an archipelago, High prices. Isolated. Wealthy.
Iron ore is one of Australias biggest exports so the place really does pay the bills for the country.
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It's really the only big town for quite a distance and felt a bit more like civilisation. The place gets generous government spending due to rules around spending a certain amount of mining royalties in the areas they come from.

See what I mean about high prices?
$5.30 for a cheeseburger.
That's £2.80 or 3.90USD
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The vibe was that it felt like a typical outer suburban suburb, its just 1000km away from anything.
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The actual port and original town is at Dampier, about a 20 min drive away.
Dampier has fame for the "Red dog" statue. There was a Kelpie that wandered around the region during the 1970s and became quite famous for its exploits, eventually even having a movie made about it
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The town was purpose built as a private town in the 70s and feels like it is frozen in time.
Nowdays anyone can live here.
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The waterfront was nice and you could watch the bulk carriers come in:

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Nearby you can go check out the gas plant, but the visitor centre was closed:
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But the highlight was Ngajarli a bit further up the Burrup peninsular, where you can see real indigenous rock carvings on the naturally occurring mountains of iron ore.


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It's just a shame when you turn around 180 degrees and see an ammonia plant a few hundred meters away, I guess they just didnt care about cultural heritage back in the 70s.
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Back in town I had this ridiculous skewer for dinner.

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This **** cabin at the local caravan park was an absurd $150 per night.
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So that's Karratha and Dampier!
 

Pokemaniac

Mountain monkey
Staff member
Administrator
Moderator
This might just be my Western European bias showing, but the place names in this report so far really seem to confirm my belief that the Australians named places after the sounds made by large rubber chunks thrown really hard at metal plates.

Pilbara, Karratha, Ningaloo, Kalbarri, Carnathon, Parraburdoo ...
 

Gazza

Giga Poster
The next few towns weren't quite as interestingly named.

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Cossack is an old settlement in the area before the mineral days, so was really just a cattle station and home for pearling boats, with a number of historic buildings to explore.

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An absurb number of ships queued up to enter:
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And the ore loaders on the horizon:
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Wickham was a smaller town designed to service another Iron Ore port....
Nothing much to the town but I did have a mining truck and train you could explore:
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Point Sampson was a sleepy little holiday town, and presumably where you live where you just want to get away from everyone and everything:

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And finally Roebourne, which the original large town in the area, and had an number of indigenous art galleries and a number of historic buildings.
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This cluster of towns was all relatively close together (Within 20km) so I had a good look around before continuing East.
The following two hours on the road consisted of countryside like this and definitely felt vast and isolated.

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Gazza

Giga Poster
The next place I stayed was Port Hedland, and lets be frank it's probably the biggest ****hole in Australia, but still interesting to see given all the industrial stuff there. It's the busiest bulk port in the world, and responsible for so much national wealth so I was surprised to see the place was a bit worn.

The Pilbara Iron Ore Railways run the longest trains in the world, and there are a couple of look outs for train foamers.
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It feels quite desolate....Dry, scrubby, dusty.
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The town is split into two parts.

Port Hedland is the old bit, where the ships come in, but it is also where the ore is stockpiled, so everything is just covered in rust red dust.

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On the waterfront you can see the massive ships meters away.

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The beach was okay.
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South Hedland is several Km south and is a planned town, but to be honest it seemed a bit rough.
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I did love the minecraft style local sports center by one of my favourite Architectural firms. ARM.
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Actually, its in 3 parts. Wedgefield is the industrial bit and had a "Big Thing", the big wheelbarrow.
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Hundreds of mining vehicles at the airport.
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As night fell I studied some of the local road maps and worked out where I could drive on public roads, and got some shots of the belts and loaders stretching across the Martian landscape.
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Now, I had really wanted to do a tour of the port loading facility, but these were not running at the time "Due to Covid", but the Seafarers mission was running tours on their boat. Because ship crews were not allowed to come ashore, the Seafarers mission would run around with care packages, and crews would throw a rope over the side and hoist it up. It was awesome seeing the action at close quarters.
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And that's Port Hedland. Inevitably if you are doing the lap around Australia you'll end up here, and it's on the way to Broome, just dont set any high expectations!
 

Hixee

Flojector
Staff member
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It's clearly all a bit grotty, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't slightly fascinated by all of it. Incredible, really.
 

Gazza

Giga Poster
I realised I forgot about this, so time to finish it.

The town of Tom Price is about 400km from Port Hedland.
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It was a company owned town designed to support the first major iron ore mine in WA.
When I was at uni I took a research subject looking specifically at mining towns and their unique circumstances and challenges. We all had to do a case study on one, and mine was Tom Price, so I was fascinated to see what it was like. You can also do a tour of the Mt Tom Price mine.

The drive down was stunning, passing through Munjina Gorge. Easily my favourite bit of road in Australia now.
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Finally I lobbed in to Tom Price. The town is in quite a picturesque location hemmed in by mountains.
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The accomodation was absurdly expensive. This **** dongha WITHOUT an ensuite was $150 a night from memory.
But because there is a steady supply of mineworkers with their expenses paid for by the company they get away with it and tourists get shafted.
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The main drawcard is of course the mine tour. Huge trucks screaming past every couple of minutes, enormous pits, sprawiling processing plants....
Whats fascinating is that all of Rio Tintos mines are run remotely from an operations centre out of Perth, so a lot of stuff is done via radio and remote controlled
equipment.

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They did seem to have a very solid safety culture, with huge warning signs around the site reminding you of risks. Eg at the workshop, heavy objects and high pressure air.
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You had to stay on the bus the whole time, except for at the lookout where you were free to wander around. Just dont touch anything lest you want to be covered in orange dust.
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Thoosie moment:
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After the tour I had a poke around the town. Reasonable level of conveniences despite being isolated. Overall a lot nicer than these other remote towns because it at least has rather pretty surrounds. A couple of the neighbourhoods were built around existing rocky outcrops you could scramble up.
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It was a planned town, so as you come in the two biggest houses were for the mine manager and the local doctor.

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So thats Tom Price!
 

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Gazza

Giga Poster
Arguably the "best till last" was Karijini National Park, which is only 50km away from Tom Price. More road:

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It's a series of spectacular gorges. I had hoped to spend a couple of days here, but it was more like a day and a half because some of the gorges were closed.
One was closed because someone slipped and fell and died, another was closed because there had been a rockslide, which had exposed the naturally occurring asbestos rock in this area, another was closed due to track maintenance.
The roads are a mixture of dirt and bitumen, but you'd be able to drive a regular car to all the important sights. No 4X4 needed.

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But what I saw was stunning.

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Most of the gorges have a rim track, and then you can descend down into them. I thought a lot of the time estimates for walks were stupidly conservative, eg saying it would take 3h when it reality it would take 1h.

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In terms of accessibility, it varies greatly, some parts just had really long staircases and ladders:
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But other parts had you edging along rocks and even wading through water.
The way i'd describe it. Imagine your kitchen cabinets could take your weight. Now imagine if you had to get all the way around your kitchen without touching the floor, by only hanging off things or treading carefully. Thats what it was like.
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So, onto the gorges, On the first Afternoon i did Fortescue Gorge. The normie gorge.
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The forces of the earth:

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The best one is Hancock gorge, where it gets so narrow that you are spider walking down a crevice barely wider than you, with daylight tens of meters above.

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It's as slippery as it looks. Before the narrow bit everyone just ditches their shoes and goes barefoot. I'd never try and wear thongs (flip flops) since you'd be guaranteed to slip and break a bone.

Eventually you reach "Kermits Pool" where you can take a cool dip
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Weanos Gorge was a little easier, but still had some significant rock hopping towards the end
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Joffre Gorge was closed so all i could do was admire the waterfall

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It's one of the best National Parks I have visited, and despite the long distance from Perth (15 hours by road) it is absolutely worth the effort.
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