Tuesday 22nd June - Tom Price to Karijini National Park

We pulled up alongside a shiny new Defender 110 outside the visitor’s centre in Tom Price this morning and had a chat to the owner and his girlfriend who are in the process of relocating from Perth to Darwin and have a month to drive up.  Apparently the door seals still leak into the foot wells - glad to see some things stay the same.

Our main reason for hanging about the visitor’s centre was to go on a tour of the iron ore mine which we duly did, and were bombarded with huge numbers throughout.

The mine is the sole reason for the town of Tom Price, which used to be a closed town built exclusively for the mine employees.  Now opened for tourists due to its proximity to Karijini National Park, the vast majority of the population still work for the mine or its related support operations.  Big trucks moving heavy loads of ore were the highlight of the tour, the rest we spent sitting on a coach being driven around the outside of the various processing plants.

We didn’t even get to see any of the nine open cast pits currently being mined (although we did get a view yesterday from the top of Mount Nameless).  Our advice is save your money.  Maybe the tour of nearby Newman mine would be better as it apparently boasts the largest man made hole in the world.

The professional opinion o f the tyre fitter at TyrePower was that our wheel rim is “Buggered” and “There aren’t any spare Land Rover rims around here”.  We can get a replacement from the place in South Australia that supplied our handbrake cable for a reasonable cost, but trucking it to, say, Broome would cost more than the rim, so we’ll have to have a think.

Leaving a bit later after lunch than planned (having chatted to Ron at the petrol station, a German solo motorcyclist on a KTM doing a bit of a tour around before flying back to Berlin in August), we didn’t arrive at Hamersley Gorge on the western edge of Karijini until mid afternoon.

The sun was off the pools at the base of the gorge and whilst it was pretty, it didn’t really strike us as that special.  What was special was watching the sun set over the surrounding landscape from the roof of the Land Rover which we managed to park on top of a nearby hill.

Refreshments consisted of nibbles and cold cans from the fridge. SPOT

A text message from Fi and Kane (who we met in Greece and ventured into Turkey with, along with Mark and Briar) came through saying that they’ll be in Broome until the end of the year which is great news as originally they were only going to be there until the end of May and we were afraid we’d miss them.  We can’t wait to catch up and hear about their return journey from Istanbul to the UK, then back of Australia.  Maybe we can also use their washing machine as everything is starting to take on a red tint.