Broome is only 600km from Port Hedland, the scene of total failure in July 2022 on our first attempt.  If we could just complete this short trip and make it into Millstream Chichester NP, we could say that we’d completed our Circle, even though we hadn’t finished it by a long chalk. 

But Broome is definitely the tourist capital up here. So we needed a few days to seed the economy in much the same way they seed the oysters. We also had to complete proper repairs to our previously jury-rigged electrical connections and steps.  Enter Broome’s best business – the people at the Broome Bolt Company were able to supply exactly the specialised nuts and bolts that I needed in exactly the quantities that I required👍👍 and treated me with disdain while they did it.  You can’t get that at Bunnings or Mitre10!  Similarly, the Repco outlet was able to sell me Anderson plugs and cable and YouTube provided the expertise to fit them.  It all took less time and effort than it might have and the results were semi-professional, or at least sustainable.

We’d been privileged to have a run down on pearl farming on our boat trip.  This gave us insight into what was going on at the Willie Creek Pearl farm, where we’d chosen the get-here-yourself tour plus optional lunch.  That meant tyres up and down for us and being passed by the tour bus which was obliviously using compromise pressures.  A couple of hours of comprehensive and informative touring around this part of the farm (much is out at sea) was both fascinating and fun.  Those of you of a certain age may recall being told in Social Studies (QLD education no doubt) that a bit of sand was popped inside an oyster and eventually resulted in a cultured pearl – well, what rubbish!  Why did they lie to us so comprehensively at school – about this and so much else?

Seeding is an intricate operation where an expert technician inserts a sphere of other-than-oyster shell into the gonad of the oyster (yes boys, I feel your pain), adds a bit of the mantle in a “secret” way and attempts to encourage nacre which is what grows a pearl.  After 2 years, if the oyster does well, it gets to have that pleasure again, only bigger.  If it doesn’t do well – sayonara!  In the meantime, there’s an endless chain of activity to keep the oyster off the ocean floor, in a cage, clean and healthy!  Perhaps most enlightening was that the oysters are caged hinge side down – that way if it dies and it happens to have a decent pearl inside, it won’t fall out and be lost on the ocean floor.  This is all very commercial.  Lesley, with her IP IT background, reckoned that the cataloguing process must be immense.  They even harvested a shell for our group’s particular benefit – it had a pearl, but it was a dud.  We thought the whole thing was great👍👍. No purchasing occurred.

Less wonderful, but perfectly fine, was dinner at The Wharf – if nothing else, we now know where all the old, well-off people in Broome go to eat an entirely average and in-no-way challenging meal.  Sadly, there appear to be lots of other interesting places to eat – we just didn’t eat there!  Our closest connection to the arts scene was when I got an excellent beard trim and haircut at The Barber of Broome and a quick look at some murals painted on a wall. 

The Thursday night markets were scheduled but we’d chosen to head out of town to learn about the stars.  Greg Quicke (#SpaceGandalf) runs Astro Tours and maybe 200 people turned up to hear him tell us about the ever-turning earth and the ever-stationary stars, cleverly point lasers into the sky and allow us to look through a whole bunch of telescopes at stuff we’d never seen before.  For instance, did you know that the star at the top of the Southern Cross (Acrux or Alpha Crucis) is actually a double star – we didn’t, but we’ve now seen it.  Greg had his idiosyncrasies but was entertaining and so well drilled that you couldn’t help but be impressed – it’s really hard to get public performance exactly right, no matter what your subject.  He even admitted that it was more romantic, if entirely false flat-earth thinking, to say “Let’s go look at the sunset” than, “Let’s go look at the earth turning away from the sun”.  He’s a largely self-taught astronomer and his claim to fame, which he told us about many times, is presenting something on TV with Brain Cox.  I sound sceptical but we were fascinated, nonetheless.

A previous great sunset at Nobby’s on the GRR will ever more be referred to as when we watched the earth turn away from the sun in spectacular fashion.

There was plenty of stuff still to see in Broome and we could have stayed an extra day, but we couldn’t have done what the people next to us were doing.  Their brand new Jayco van had a shattered front window tacked randomly together with hundred-mile-an-hour tape.  It had simply fallen out, not on the GRR or somewhere exciting, but just driving up the highway.  The pressure blast had then blown out their door!  A replacement window had been ordered, delivered 4 weeks later, found to be damaged and another one ordered.  So that’s 2 months – fortunately, they had booked to be in Broome for 8 weeks anyway, so all would turn out well.  What on earth do you do crammed in a caravan park for 8 weeks when you can barely even see the water and you’ve got a dog on board?  We were nonplussed, having wished we’d spent an extra night – which would have made it 4.  We also met some lovely people who’ve been coming to Broome for 3 months each year for 13 years with a group of about 5 other caravans (different CP – Cable Beach but not on the beach) but we found it incomprehensible.  No doubt the fault is ours.

As is the way, someone had told me that I must stop at 80 Mile Beach – so we did.  Not a lot to say except, it was beautiful with a really long beach (go on, guess?) that appeared to be just made for 4WDing and fishing.  Again, we met people who came here every year for weeks on end, but if tranquillity and fishing was your object, that at least made sense.  This may surprise you, but fishing bores me rigid.  If I’m not catching something decent every few minutes, I’m over it.  And even then, I really only care about the eating, not the hunting. 

However, it did give us the opportunity to meet the Sage of 80 Mile Beach – Pete was a young apprentice mechanic when he was involved in a small taxi company in Perth, owned by a drunk Greek who didn’t pay properly.  Through a convoluted, detailed and quite possibly true series of adventures, Pete ended up running the business, being paid handsomely by the Greek and was now, 55 years later, towing a nice big van with a RAM, having finally discarded his twelfth (!) LandCruiser.  You might think I’d been mute, but my marketing know-how was able to contribute gems such as “Mustang bred Falcon” when he mentioned the XR (an infinitely superior cab to the Holden of the day).  In any event, anything I had to say didn’t stop the flow and I finally now know why people do, indeed, go fishing.  Unfortunately, Pete also said he knew how to fish.  He had other views on other topics, but you’ve probably got the gist.

We had a momentous event in front of us.  The chance to visit Port Hedland on a Sunday, do a quick shop, pass by the BlackRock Tourist Park for old times’ sake, where Lesley had lived in ATGANI while I was drugged-up in the hospital, and then to head on to Millstream Chichester NP.  We were genuinely excited as this meant, and more importantly felt, like a full circle completed.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s a long way to go, but somehow this felt HUGE!  The fact that we were in the Pilbara and could therefore buy no wine nor beer to sustain us was problematic (supplies were low due to careless under-shopping in Broome) but we had enough to see us through Millstream and on into Tom Price…just! 

Millstream Chichester NP was the intended target when it all went pear shaped previously and, by the by, it must be up for a name change soon?  It also has a campground called Stargazers because of the lack of ambient light giving great…stargazing.  However, with nearly a full moon, the gazing was lovely but not astounding.  It was just a one-nighter for us and we had chosen to travel on to Tom Price down their rail access road.

RioTinto own the rail line from the various Tom Price mine sites to Dampier where the crushed iron ore is shipped overseas in unimaginably vast quantities.  To maintain (probably to build?) the rail line, there’s a road that runs beside it and they let people-like-us use it as well as their own workers.  To travel on it and, no doubt, to meet their own H&S standards, we had to get a permit.  If you get your free permit at somewhere like a tourist information centre, they make you watch a 15 minute video and then hand you a permit.  If you plan no more than 48 hours ahead, you need to find reception and then get your permit online!  To be granted the permit, you have to complete an online test AND, it turned out, you have to get 100%!  Naturally, I went straight to the test, disregarding the important educational videos and, naturally, failed!  Most of the questions are common sense but there’s a couple of tricks inserted, presumably to thwart people like me…so, I watched the video and now know that you’re allowed 20 seconds (not 10, not 30) to traverse an unmanned railway crossing!

The permit was one thing but the road was another.  If we’d thought the GRR was red, it was pale compared to here.  It’s iron ore country and the rusty dust is bright red and super fine, getting into everything.  The rail line is heavily trafficked and we must have seen a dozen 2km long trains in our 120km trek.  As with so many things out here, the scale is massive. 

Another dirt road covered, we pumped up the tyres, moved on to the “easy” bitumen and headed into Tom Price for supplies. We then pointed our nose towards one of our favourite places, Karajini NP.

We’d been here briefly before, but this time I was mobile and we had four nights booked in a decent campsite and were looking forward to more gorges, and of course, more swims.  What could possibly go wrong?