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After more than two years on the road, we have at last crossed the Tropic of Capricorn! Beyond that line, the termite nests begin, almost as if they know they're in the tropics.
Our first stop in the tropics is Coral Bay, and since it was raining when we arrived, we put up the big tent (for the first time since Kondinin). Coral Bay is aptly named. The waves crash over Ningaloo Reef about a kilometre off shore. The bay is thus very sheltered, and a perfect place for an ocean kayak. As long as the wind is calm, it is easy to paddle out into the bay and see a wide range of coral. We would have explored the bay a little more, but we spent a day sorting out some computer problems at one of the local caravan parks.
From Coral Bay we headed north to Exmouth.
Just south of town on the eastern edge of Cape Range National Park are a pair of canyons, Shothole and Charles Knife.
Charles Knife Road leads up a ridge with steep dropoffs into canyons on each side, somewhat reminiscent of the drive along Route 12 in Utah.
At the top are an abandoned oil well, and an excellent hike above the canyons.
The Shot Hole road leads up the bottom of Shot Hole Canyon, to the base of the (now closed) hike to the top.
Helen had set her sights on a boat ride, since we were now on Australia's OTHER reef. We couldn't quite afford (or see the value in) the $700 the whale shark tour. When we tried to book a ride, most of the boats were either not running or out fishing. We finally settled on the only trip available during our stay, and made a booking. The next afternoon we arrived at the appointed location, only to be told by the rather gruff staff of Ningaloo Coral Explorer that they had better things to do with their afternoon and we should go back to the visitor centre for a refund. You wouldn't think it would be so hard to get a boat ride in a tourist town like Exmouth!
From Exmouth we headed into the western side of Cape Range for a couple of nights camping.
During the current school holidays, every campsite in Exmouth is booked.
CALM allow visitors to the park to camp for up to 28 days, but you can't make a booking.
The recommended method to obtain a campsite is to be at the gate to the park at 8:00 AM (about 100 km out of Exmouth), and hope you're lucky.
One day CALM will wake up and limit peak period camping to 4 days and implement a booking system.
Despite this silliness, we actually managed to get a campsite for a couple of nights! This enabled us to hike the (much smaller) gorges of the western side, kayak up Yardie Creek to see the elusive black footed rock wallabies sheltering in the caves, and drift snorkel the excellent sheltered beaches. The coral is not as colourful as it is on the Great Barrier Reef, but the fish are just as colourful and almost as plentiful. The biggest bonus is being able to snorkel in calm waters straight off the beach.
We took the 4WD track back along the coast back to Coral Bay, to spend another two days sorting out ongoing computer problems. During that time (while Bill was at the keyboard), Helen finally got her boat ride, on a "Sub Sea". With the school holidays now truly upon us, it was time to head inland to avoid the crowds.
Our first stop was Mt Augustus National Park, the world's largest rock.
Needless to say, Helen was very keen to hike the summit.
We did a shorter hike the first day as a warm up, and on the next morning arose in time for a beautiful sunrise.
At the trail head we found several 5 kg bags of cement and a request for volunteer pack animals from the ranger.
When we reached the summit, we found an engaging 72 year old ranger, rebuilding a rock cairn.
It seems he'd come out of retirement for a short assignment doing some much needed work in the park. Later that day and back at the campground, we gave him a bit of a training lesson on his GPS. We loaded some waypoints, and showed him how to use the GPS to find them. With luck, the new boundary signs for the park will end up in about the right place!
From there we headed up to Tom Price, a town created in the early 60's to exploit iron ore.
The mine tour uses a bus to explore one of the largest open cut mines in Australia, and it is a bloody big hole in the ground.
In addition to the usual restocking, washing, refueling, servicing, etc, we picked up a new memory card for the camera and a reader to make transferring the pictures to the camera easier - both at prices cheaper than the best Sydney mail order has to offer!
Tom Price is also home to Mt Nameless. It is the tallest mountain in WA where you can drive to the peak, and it provides great views of the town and the mine. (Not a patch on the high country, but we're 4000 km from there now.) The local aboriginals are a little unhappy about the name Mt Nameless. It's had a name for 40,000 years, but no one bothered to ask them.
The works of nature are far more impressive than the works of man. (You can quote me on that.) We left the ore pits behind, and headed out to the gorges of Karijini National Park. As a matter of pure good fortune, we explored the gorges in a sequence that lead us to the most spectacular ones last. It is truly amazing to find such strips of lush abundance in an otherwise dry and dusty landscape. It is also a place of contrasting colours, the white bark of the snappy gums against the red rocks, or the straw green spinifex plains against the blue sky.
As so often happens, work finds us in the most remote places. A fellow camper was having trouble with his laptop, and the computer shop he'd recently taken it to was not much help. He'd seen us down in Albany a few months back, and seeing us now tapping away on our keyboards in the shade with the panel in the sun, decided we might be of more help. The final diagnosis was that his new inverter was doing very nasty things to his laptop.
Being open for business every day means that no matter where we are, we're always available by phone. Helen reached the big 4 0 milestone while we were in Karijini. It prompted a couple of calls on the sat phone, and many more voice mail messages on the mobile once we got back into range.
Our last stop in the Pilbara is Millstream Chichester National Park, which offers stretches of water long enough and deep enough for the kayaks. Small sections of the Fortesque river are deep enough to expose the underlying aquifer, and hence form permanent pools.
Since heading north out of Perth we have been travelling in "wildflower territory", without actually seeing any.
Finally in Karijini we have caught up with the flowering season, and have started to see some of the desert blossoms.
After several days of hiking in Karijini it is once again time to continue northward, this time along the spectacular single lane road through Rio Tinto Gorge.
Karratha is the centre of a set of towns including Dampier, Roeburn, and a few other villages including the virtual ghost town of Cossack. Overall the whole collection is rather uninspiring and unfriendly. Red rocks and spinifex give way to mangroves and ocean. The juxtaposition of rampant mining exploitation towns adjacent to pearling towns that died from over-exploitation of resources seems lost on the residents.
Roeburn also introduced us to our local version of slavery, an otherwise well buried aspect of our history. For some reason, convicts were not used as labour in the tropics. Consequently, our ancestors enslaved the aborigines as a labour force using many of the tricks that worked so well in Africa. The unlucky ones lived in chains or died diving for pearls to make their masters rich.
Port Headland a little further along the coast is even less inspiring. I guess there's not a lot you can expect from single industry towns. At least in Headland they process some of the ore into higher value brickettes before exporting them. As we moved north/east along the coast, the vegetation became thicker and the trees taller. Our last night in the tent for a while was in Port Smith, a very nice little estuary that is home to yet another aviary.
Cable Beach is somewhat unique, and has to be seen to be believed. Broome's massive tides, and the beach's gentle slope makes the beach at least four times wider at low tide. During the day, with clothing optional, it's a 4WD parking lot. In the evenings, you can (and Helen and Jen did) take a camel ride to watch the spectacular sunset.
After exploring all that Broome has to offer, including the much famed Cable Beach and the Broome Bird Observatory, the four of us headed north to Cape Leveque. Of course, Fred went fishing most days. The big fish story from the trip was a 20 lb golden trevally he pulled in on his fly rod. All too soon it was time to wave goodbye to Fred and Jen at the airport, and head out into the Kimberley.