Driving through the Pillbara 9 to 11/9/15
We left Tom Price after the mine tour and a late lunch, going onto the bitumen road towards Paraburdoo. Sarah had wanted to play with Kristin and we had wanted her to run around a bit more since we had been sitting on the tour bus for 2 hours. The Tourist Information Centre told us that the old (=gravel) main road towards the coast (which is approximately 70 km shorter than via Paraburdoo) is too bad to tow a caravan. (later that day we met Christin again who had happily driven her old 2 WD car on that gravel road with no complaint at all… thanks, Information Centre!). There’s nothing much to see on the ~400km to Exmouth but the landscape… OMG it is just plain beautiful. There’s green and pink and yellow. There are rocks and ranges and wide plains. And nothing disturbs the view. No house, no electricity cable, no towers, just the odd fence of a station. The only drawback: it’s much lower than Tom Price in altitude so we had a “lovely” 36C today.
The second night we also stopped at an official stop. We were early, so we lit a small fire and cooked a lovely stew in our camp oven. The stop was a big area with only one other camper on it. Then a third camper turned up and setup camp right next to us. He was hardly finished setting up, when he came over and complaint about our fire. You got to wonder.
For the 3rd night we decided to give the official stops the big finger, sorry, I meant 'a miss'. It took us a little while to find a little track behind a quarry leading to a waterhole. The water was all gone and all that was left was a gravel base with some dry mud, crackled under the burning sun, looking like chocolate. We drove our caravan onto the side. We had Internet to Skype with Götti and the grandparents. Sarah was happily playing all afternoon with the ‘chocolate pieces’ and some water, which mixed to a wonderful mud.
The sunset was fantastic, again. And I managed to get a clear shoot of the sky at night. What a camp!
