Fuel tension
18th December 2005

It’s about 650km from Port Hedland to Broome and absolutely nothing to stop and look at except for a couple of beaches (Eighty Mile Beach) and one or two fuel stations.
Having calculated how far we could drive without refuelling and “knowing” where the next fuel stations were, we ended up driving 100km with the fuel gauge alarm lit before we finally found a fuel station… just 2-3 litres of fuel left Could say that my driver Tanja was pretty pissed off at me!

Found our way over to one of the best hostels we had stayed at so far; Broome Last Resort. It’s a nice backpacker place with a pool, hammocks and a bar. Recommended! The water was however almost too warm =)
Broome has the world’s oldest operational cinema, which is even an outdoor cinema; Sun Pictures. We had to go there to relax a bit, and saw a quite nice movie called The Constant Gardner – it’s about a British diplomat that lives in Africa and whose wife under strange circumstances dies. Different from the normal Hollywood action movies I normally see.

Port Hedland
17th December 2005

Not that far between Karratha and Port Hedland (but it reduces the time up to Broome), so we drove a bit around Karratha. First we drove back to the same beach to look at some aboriginal rock paintings – although we didn’t find them. Took a short trip through Dampier (25km from Karratha), which more or less is a shipping town for the gas industry in the Karratha region.
Between Karratha and Port Hedland we drove through a small ghost town called Cossack, which contains just 5-6 buildings. Supposedly a much bigger town 100-200 years ago, but these days it has very little to offer.
Up in Port Hedland we checked into a small backpacker hostel near “downtown”. Near the hostel there is a observation tower where you can climb up and admire the view over the red town… because Port Hedland is really a red town after all the red Pilbarra desert sand. Even pigeons are red

As a side note; up until Karratha it had of course been hot with over or around 30 degrees, but from now on we also had pressing humidity upon us also. Unluckily we couldn’t find any beach with any shade so we ended up in a park for a couple of hours instead – hot enough that also!

Photos can be found in the Gallery.

Karratha
16th December 2005

From Coral Bay up to Broome there is more or less nothing to see along the 1500km long highway except for a few small towns - Karratha was our first stop on the way. Ended up in a old backpacker hostel which… well… was clean but perhaps a place you would like to stay away from unless you like partying with men & women in their fifties.
Walked around in Karratha a bit, but mainly stayed at the shopping centre where I could stay cool.
We had been invited to a barbeque at the beach by the hostel owner – something that seemed nice and we headed along with some of the other people from the hostel. What we came to was however far away from what I had expected – in a positive way!

What we came to was a beautiful cove with a long shallow beach. Lots of people came, outside a bus there were set up huge speakers for a ‘disco on the beach’, we build a fire at the beach, kids running around with light sticks, beautiful sunset and a even more beautiful moonrise. It was a full moon, so it came creeping up from the ocean in the horizon really red, and as it went further up it became more golden yellow and in the end the normal white yellowish colour. Freshly BBQ’ed fish was served which tasted delicious – especially after a long day of eating more or less nothing
Somehow it is very peaceful lying on the beach at night, music playing, looking at stars and moonrise while everybody is having a fun time!

Images can be found in the Gallery.

Kayaking and snorkeling
15th December 2005

Today we started our adventure out to the Ningaloo Marine Park – a mini version of Great Barrier Reef. Right on the beach it is possible to rent kayaks, but also get guided kayak tours with snorkeling out in the reef. So we geared up in wetsuits and kayaked about a kilometer out of Coral Bay. I would believe it would be hard on the arm muscles to be my first time kayaking, but no – actually got surprisingly more of a cramp in my legs. Anyway, we got out to the reef where we anchored up and started snorkeling around.

Our guide brought along a underwater camera and took pictures of us kayaking, snorkeling and the wildlife under the surface; sharks, reefs, turtles, fish and so on. Not as pretty and colorful as Great Barrier Reef (see blog post from my trip up to Cairns and the Gallery). Snorkeled around there 45 minutes before we kayaked a bit back where we did some more snorkeling while our guide attracted fish by emptying food into the water. Got plenty of nice close-up pictures of fish by doing so.

Tom and Birgitte even showed us how to climb up into the kayak, and… fall out. Twice.
Back at the beach we could bye a CD with the pictures the guide took, and you can look at them in the Gallery.
The rest of the day was spent at a café and the beach – although staying in the shadow was preferred because of the heat.

Plenty of pictures from Coral bay and our kayaking/snorkeling tour can be seen in the Gallery.

Sharks
14th December 2005

Beach day… spent more or less the whole day at the beach. Good!

Tanja and Tom got a inside tip about a spot where reef sharks swam close to the beach, so we walked out there and stood with water up to our knees as sharks were swimming just a couple of meters away from us. Cool!

Images from Coral Bay can be found in the Gallery.