2026 Western Australia

 The road from Broome to Port Hedland is about as straight and featureless as a highway could be. I used tooth picks to prop my eyelids open on the six hour drive. Everything is the same except the vegetation gradually gets browner and sparser. We stayed in a very crowded and expensive caravan park in Port Hedland. It seems like a lot of these young miners buy a brand new Toyota Landcruiser and a caravan. They park all this stuff and the wives and kids in the park and head off to work.  From Port Hedland  we drove to Roebourne and toured the old restored pearling community of Cossack. Ironically it is the aboriginal people that own and run the the place.   After that we drove to Karratha where they have salt mines, iron ore mines and natural gas plants and the most expensive caravan park yet.  Near Karratha is some of the oldest aboriginal rock art in Australia. Some of it is dated at 48000 years old. Within spitting distance is a massive natural gas plant....

 The town of Derby is a few hours drive from Broome. They have a dock onto a very stagnant muddy bay.   If you want to get twenty pounds of sticky mud on your sandals, you can tour their sculpture park.   Oh and I forgot the Baobab Prison tree.  They used to chain aboriginals to this tree as they were transporting them to the coast to work as slaves in the pearling industry.  We stayed in an empty but buggy caravan park.  The next day we drove to Fitzroy Crossing. We saw many fine baobab trees enroute.  Fitzroy Crossing is well known for it's bridge that was rebuilt in a matter of months after a cyclone destroyed the old one. Obviously they had a greater sense of urgency than the builders of the Teslin Bridge.   Everyone raved about the Kimberleys . Unfortunately most of the roads into the range are long and only suitable for well prepared four wheel drive vehicles. There is a sealed road into the park at Fitzroy Crossing but we wer...

Broome is a very fine place and the biggest town for many hundreds of miles. It has lots of beaches and lots to see and do. The local museum is fascinating. The early settlers enslaved the aboriginal people into the pearling industry. Their treatment was appalling. The Japanese also attacked this area during the second world War. I guess because of the wet heat there are not a lot of tourists around. At times it seems we are the only tourists in town. We pulled into an empty caravan park, minutes from Cable beach and discovered this amazing pool. And we have it to ourselves. Close to town you can go out to a wave swept point and see dinosaur prints. This is a sauropod print. It is 130 million years old. Imagine putting your hand into a print that was created even before there was a North American continent. This is an octopus shuttling around  

 As we travelled north people spoke in ominous tones about the wet heat. Supposedly wet heat is hotter than dry heat.  As we drove North from Port Hedland to Broome the vegetation gradually got greener and and the trees grew larger and the heat got wetter. Soon there was water on the road and we started to see baobab trees. The dry heat comes with flies, hundreds and hundreds of them. They are particularly fond of flying into your eyes nose and mouth. Yammy was not that bothered by them but they were driving me crazy. In Canarvon I had a doctor prescribe me an anti psychotic drug. It worked for the bugs but I found I couldn't drive faster than sixty kilometers an hour.  In the North there are just a smattering of flies. But there are mosquitoes and a myriad assortment of biting insects. Pretty soon my varicose engorged legs were pitted with bug bites. Waving away flies was replaced with scratching bug bites. The scratching became so bad that when I was driving I would wea...

 From Cararvon we drove inland to Karijini Nat Park. The drive was spectacular . We spent the night at the town of Tom Price and the next morning entered the park. There was no shortage of heat and flies. In fact the flies were just about driving us nuts until we arrived at this spectacular gorge pool. It saved the day.  The millipedes are not poisonous. There are so many that they make the rocks slippery and treacherous to walk on. That evening we stayed in a very hot dry buggy camp site. As soon as the sun went down the bugs magically disappeared. The stars came out and the dingos started  howling just meters away from our camp site. It was awesome. From Karijini we drove North and West to Port Hedland. This drive was also very scenic and very busy with road trains blasting by every few minutes. There was a near blog ending road incident involving two road trains blasting down the highway and my extreme stupidity that still gives me nightmares. We survived and I hope I ...