Carnarvon

Before leaving Carnarvon we restocked with food, water and fuel. The town had little else to offer. Curiously there were many lush tropical farms though the river was usually a bare stream of sand. At least on our visit there were some discontinuous billabongs. The secret was the water flowed through the sand itself below surface and was easily extracted in great quantities by bores.

Our next destination - again off the highway - was Coral Bay; a very small town of two camp grounds, a hotel and a small shopping centre. It turned out to be the highlight of the trip so far as it was located idyllically only metres from the Southern end of the Ningaloo Reef. On our first day we explored the reef in a glass bottom boat being impressed with the colourful fish though less so with the coral (hard coral is not as colourful). One local fish was the large snapper like spangled emperor, which seemed happy to follow the boats around, perhaps because the tour operators fed them.

A further day beckoned, when we undertook a sailing cruise, curiously on a version of the Seawind catamaran that we had rented on Lake Macquarie. I was even tempted to snorkel over the reef despite the continuing effects of a cold. During the afternoon, we reacquainted ourselves with the pleasure of sitting on a beach in the warm sun while undertaking short swims from the edge to observe the fish life among the nearby coral.

Other options included swimming with whale sharks or manta rays and fishing trips, though these we declined. Reluctantly we moved on after three nights.

The next three days we devoted to traversing the many kilometres towards Broome including crossing the iron rich Pilbara and the boring Great Sandy Desert. Our first destination was Karratha over 550 kilometres through largely empty countryside. The town, though modern with several shopping centres, offered little else as it was merely a residential base for iron ore and gas exports from Dampier. From there we pressed on covering a similar distance to Eighty Mile Beach and passing through the other major industrial town of Port Hedland. It seemed curious as to why it took till 1962 to discover that mountains of iron ore were present as the rusty iron staining of rocks and soil was everywhere, sometimes overlaid by a purplish magnesium hue. There were even frequent rivers some permanent while some were mere intermittent strings of pools. In a couple of cases the violence of the wet was obvious in the shattered bridges.

On our way we passed the large pleasant tree-lined de Grey River where we stopped for lunch though not without some concerned glances at the river which marked the start of the habitat of the estuarine crocodile.

The 600 kilometres from Port Hedland to Broome did not include a single hamlet, though a few roads wandered off to large pastoral stations some seeming hundreds of square kilometres. The two high points of the entire stretch were road houses which are little more than purveyors of expensive fuel some with tawdry camping grounds and taverns – the need for a cold road side beer bothers me. The severe aridity of the countryside now moderated as we were in the area which received the monsoon rains of the wet season and the bare red earth (pindan) between shrubs was now more often covered in tussock grasses. In the Pilbara, there were even rivers, though further north in the desert, the flatness was only paused by wide shallow flood-ways and rivers were rare.

A short break at Eighty Mile Beach broke the journey though at the expense of a 10 kilometre track along a corrugated gravel road. We almost gave up when some young kids lay in wait as we approached the camp site to throw stones. I reversed and bellowed at them doing little for my blood pressure or nerves, but irrationally angry at the stupidity of the activity. As happens in this world we were assigned the site - among two hundred or so - next to their extended family.

Finally after a third day of mainly driving through the boring sandy desert we arrived at Broome.