Exmouth

After leaving Karijini, we had a couple of roadside camps. One on the banks of the Beasley River, where the boys enjoyed building some forts and playing wars, while Jaime helped a fellow camper who got stuck in the soft sand in his big bus. We then camped at a roadside area on the way up to Exmouth. We are currently in Exmouth for one day, and are planning to head out fishing tomorrow before we head down the Ningaloo Station and then into Cape Range National Park for one or two weeks. We will be doing a lot of snorkelling on the coral reef, and fishing whenever we can. You will just have to wait a few weeks for pictures and details as we won't have internet while down in that area.

Onslow or Exmouth

We have left Karijini, been through Tom Price and are not sure where we are headed yet. All we know at the moment is that we are going to head back to the coast again, don't know if we will go up into Onslow or head straight down to Ningaloo Reef. We will keep you posted.

Karijini National Park - AWESOME!

WOW! What an fantastic place. The Hamersley Ranges are really beautiful and we all rated Karijini as having the best gorges we have seen to date. It was great fun here! Karijini also won the award for the coldest water – jumping into the water holes here was like jumping into a pool of ice water, it was so cold it stung!

The first day in Karijini we walked through Dales Gorge, checking out three swimming holes and their waterfalls. They were all beautiful swimming holes, with the big red cliffs around them and Fortescue Falls was the best falls by far. The boys all found some places where they could climb the cliffs to jump in the water.

The next day we moved over to Hancock and Weano Gorges and these were awesome fun to explore, especially down the ‘Spider Walk’ in Handcock Gorge and the ‘Handrail Walk’ in Weano Gorge. At these sections you had walk with your hands and feet on either side of the gorge straddling the freezing water running underneath you. For anyone who used to love climbing up the hallway at home like a spider to touch the roof (before your Mum told to get down and stop putting foot and hand prints all over the walls), then it was just like doing that, except that you not only had to climb up but then you had to work your way along the Gorge as a spider. In other sections you just had to climb across one of the faces of the gorge finding little holds for your feet and hands as you went. You would continually work your way through little narrow sections like these and then it would open up to a pool before narrowing off again. We went as far as we could through the Gorges before it got to the sections where the only way to continue was to abseil, if we had abseil gear with us we would have continued, but unfortunately that was not something we had thought of packing to bring on this trip!

Anyone heading over to WA and coming past this area, we strongly recommend you pay Karijini National Park a visit!

We have got slide shows working again, so here is a quick slide show of some of our photos from Karijini. 

Port Hedland

We headed into Port Hedland the next morning. Well that is a place you can cross off your list of towns to visit, the only reason you would visit this town is for the reason we went in there, to refuel and pick up a couple of grocery items. If you are not driving a white car with an orange mine flag and wearing a fluro shirt, then you stand out like a sore thumb!  We thought you saw a lot of fluro shirts around Orange, but it is nothing like Port Hedland! After leaving Port Hedland we headed South East towards the Hamersley Ranges and Karijini National Park where we found a road side free camp for the night, so that we could head into Karijini early the next morning. The famous WA wild flowers are just coming into bloom at the moment, although not in full bloom yet, from what you can see at the moment you can tell it will look spectacular in a couple of weeks time.

Eighty Mile Beach – De Grey River

All the fishermen on Eighty Mile Beach - not one of them catching a fish!!

We left Broome with the plan to camp next on Eighty Mile Beach. We went in and visited a couple of the places you could camp at along Eighty Mile but then we decided to free camp elsewhere instead. It was a funny sight to see. The beach was lined as far as you could see with fisherman standing about 15-20m apart from each other, all with rods out in the water hoping to bring in a feed. The only problem was that after we spoke to a number of fishermen who had been fishing for 2-3 weeks there every day, no one was catching anything! With the number of hooks out there in the water, there obviously couldn’t be any fish, as fish would get caught simply by getting tangled up in all the fishing line in the water! We didn’t waste our time putting a line in! We camped one night at a road side camp area set back a few hundred metres from the road and the second night on the banks of the De Grey River not far from Port Headland.