The Burrup peninsular was the destination for today. There is more big stuff up here as there is in all these mining towns we have visited along this stretch of coast over the last few days. From Karratha you can see one of the flare towers with it’s flame burning away all day. Once you drive up to them the roaring, the intensity and size of the flames become evident. The huge scale of the plant becomes evident as well. The flare towers and flame are actually a safety device for the plant. We also passed another salt mine driving out here.

The information centre was closed on the weekends and even if we stayed another day it was closed for maintenance for half of Monday. We have just timed everything wrong around here but if the brochures actually said what days thing were closed it would be easy! The iron ore brochure for the tour neglects to mention it only runs on a Tuesday or Thursday and we arrived on Friday. There was quite a bit of information and things to look at outside the visitors centre including a piece of the gas undersea pipe they use from the offshore platforms to the land based gas processing here. The pipe is well covered by several corrosion layers, more bitumen layers, fibre glass layer and then a large concrete cover around it to top it off. It was 1410Kg per meter in air and 300Kg per meter in water.

Two of the flare towers

Storage tanks near the wharf

Plant, photo scale does not show how big it is. They use bikes to get around the plant.

Under sea pipe section

Under sea pipe specs

Amusing signs every where!

After all that excitement we went and tried a bit of 4WD along the area behind the plant into the Burrup Peninsular. There were so many boat trailers in the first part. We got a fair way in to our destination but the camper was rocking and rolling quite a bit as we had it full of water and supplies. We decided to walk the last 1.6Km rather than risk the car unnecessarily. We would have made it easily but as they say “10Km of walking is better than 1Km of pushing”. The view up on the high point was pretty good though and we were almost walking as fast as the 4WD’s anyway. You can continue on from here another 8Km to the end of the peninsular and it is popular with locals. You need a good 4WD with high clearance to get over the ‘jump up’ and it is tidal in parts as well. Quite a few people coming out on the low tide as we walked in. This is a very popular local fishing spot. We only saw one small fish get pulled in during our time there so we moved on with the rods still in the camper draw.

The easy part of the ‘jump up’

Sharon got eaten alive by the sand flies around the mangroves. I was unaware of them at all as they must have all swarmed over to Sharon. She has several bites on her back, arms, legs, yep about everywhere that was exposed! We drove to Hearsons beach but the tide was so far out we needed binoculars to see the people who had walked out so far only to get their ankles under water!

We left there as well and ended up in Dampier home of ‘Red Dog’. Not much to do here and we saw the sites and fought our way through the fathers day crush around the show and shine at the local park and had lunch at the Red Dog monument in the shade. Here another Tassie camper pulled up and they were from Sheffield and he had made his own camper on a stretch Prado. Not much else today but to fuel up, grog up and grocery up for the next few days heading inland to more gorges and walking trails.

Red Dog

We had a few spits of rain here late today. This is the first rain since Melrose quite a few weeks ago. It is getting hot here as well even though we have gone south. Later in the week Karratha is expecting 35. The days here are great until about 1PM and then it gets very hot for a while and then cools off after the sun goes down. We are looking forward to getting back into the bush again. We are trying to catch up with Greg Hills Sharon’s cousin who works up here as a commercial diver at Dampier but timings are again against us as he is working today.