Thursday 20th August.

Time to Leave 80 mile Beach. What a great place, even better if you like fishing or shell collecting. We picked up quite a few but not as many as some people seemed to be gathering up. I’m not sure what they do with them all.

We headed off early, clearing the park by 8am heading for Port Headland as the first stopping off point to see where we wanted to spend the night. after we had visited the visitors bureau. It was a warm day with the temp getting up to a high of 34 deg C.

We set Tom Tom for Roebourne about 472 kms away down the great Northern Highway also called the Warlu Way. All much the same, the road was good and mostly straight,the landscape very flat all the until we were on the outskirts of Port Headland when there were rocky outcrops very reminiscent of Mount Isa. Extensive road works were in progress just south of Port Hedland which resulted us having to stop on numerous occasions.All this resulted in the car and trailer getting covered in red dirt. We passed a group of termite mounds that had all been capped with white hard hats which was quite amusing, there must have been about 15 of the them.

Port Headlands major change took place in the 1960’s with the development of of the iron ore deposits. Major expansion took place in 1965 with the population exploding from a mere 1200 people to 15000 nowadays. The port handled 100,000 tonnes of cargo in that year however today the port is one of the worlds largest in tonnage terms with over 70 million tonnes of product worth more than $3 billion shipped each year.

As we drove into the area we saw some of the largest salt piles and some of the longest trains ever at up to 5 kms long being pulled by 6 locomotives.

This is a mining town with everything geared towards the support of the mines and the hundreds of people that work in them. Everywhere you looked there we people walking around in their work gear of overalls and bright coloured safety vests. Nearly all the vehicles/utes were from the mines complete with the long whip ariels and red flags that they all seem to have. no doubt so they can be seen.

We found the tourist bureau and picked up whatever leaflets and information we didn’t already have then drove off to the park to have our ready made lunch before driving out and on to Roebourne.

We had already tried to get into a couple of places at Point Samson however we were unlucky as they were both full for the night so to cover ourselves we phoned ahead to the Harding River Caravan Park where we were able to get them them to hold a place for us.We will set up there for a few days and drive out to the places from there, we can cover Point Samson,Karratha and Dampier quite comfortably in a day and then we can set off heading for Exmouth.

It all worked out OK and we set everything up and had our dinner and settled down for the evening with a gentle breeze blowing and the temp down to a pleasant 24deg.