Karratha, Dampier, Port Headland & Finally sweep into Broome!.

 

As we head towards the town of Karratha we enter into the Pilbara region of WA, where the landscape from the road constantly changes, sometimes it flat and you can see for miles around and other times your driving through rocky hills. The only continuing feature is the termite mounds that seem to dominate the land like skyscrapers, some of which can be 2 meters high and over a meter wide.

 

(This is what happens when James gets bored… photos of us in the car!)

Closer to Karratha the road gets busier with big road trains and work vehicles, as gas plants and mining sites come into view. Small make shift villages made up of portable cabin like homes can be viewed from the side of the road. Karratha itself seems to be under construction everywhere you look, so tired and hot we head to the tourist information centre to grab details of the caravan parks and head towards Dampier where I (James) heard the best words ever spoken to me by a manager in a caravan park “All you can eat buffet!!”. Apparently in the hotel next door they have a restaurant with a full buffet for only $25, bargain!!!. According to Katrina we had the tent set up in record time! and shortly after I was overloading my plate with goodies, making sure I had just enough room for coffee and cake (well two pieces of cake, tell a lie it was actually three ) My belly now bulging and belt buckle undone it was a slow waddle back to the tent.

 

The next day, we skipped breakfast and headed to Point Samson, then onto Cossack but not before stopping at Wickham to have our pictures taken next to a big Tonka toy (see picture below) This is still small in comparison to the ones used today. I would love to drive one of these to Tesco’s and get my weekly shopping,  plenty of room for all your food and then some.

Cossack, is nestled at the mouth of the Harding River on Western Australia’s, West Pilbara Coast, it has experienced a somewhat chequered past, but today, many fine stone buildings have been fully restored to provide informative and memorable insights into the town’s wild and fascinating history.  During the Pilbara gold rush thousands of people came to the WA town of Cossack in search of their fortune. Its port also became the home of a fast-growing pearling industry, but once the area had been fished out, the fleet moved further north to Broome.  We managed to get some good photo’s of the town from the top of water tank hill.

From there we had a look around Roebourne were the visitor centre is actually part of the old goal.  Roebourne is the oldest serving town in the Pilbara, being gazetted a town in 1866. Roebourne was named after Sir John Septimus Roe, the first Surveyor General in Western Australia in 1864.

John & Emma Withnell were the early settlers to our area, responsible for originally traveling the 13km upstream in search of fresh water, discovering Eramuckadoo pool in the Harding River. This was the place that they decided to establish Mt Welcome Station, now the town site of Roebourne.

Heading back towards Dampier, we went to the North West Shelf Visitors Centre.  The NWSV is the largest oil and gas venture in the world and has been running since the 1970’s. The visitors centre was very informative. (I fell asleep watching during the video, it was so nice in the air conditioning!)

Not far from the NWSV is Hearson’s cove and  Deep Gorge.  The gorge is known to have over 10,000 individual rock engravings, as the terrain was pretty hard going we didn’t venture to far into the gorge by far enough to get some photo’s. 

As we pulled back into Dampier we stop to get a photo of the red dog statue. Dampier is were the original story came from before it was made into a film. This famous kelpie was born in Paraburdoo in 1971, but spent most of his years travelling throughout the entire region, from Perth to Broome. He would hitch lifts in trucks or buses, however his exceptional homing instincts always returned him to Dampier or Karratha.

We made it back to the tent just before our belly’s started rumbling for dinner.  Katrina questioned me, ”all you can eat buffet again?” to which I replied, “hell yeah, we have a long drive tomorrow”…………any excuse will do.

We set off early for our 850 km drive to Broome only stopping for fuel and to pop into Port Headland to have a quick look round, this took all of 20 mins as there’s not much to see, other than the below guy.  We didn’t quite make it to Broome but pulled into a roadside stop for the night about 150km away and James being a pyromaniac had to light a fire!, we set of early the following morning.