Karratha and Cape Keraudren

Karratha is an amazing place, talk about busy! We even experienced our 1^st traffic jam since Perth and it was scary! Thankfully no traffic lights, I wouldn’t know what to do at them after all this time.

The town is absolutely booming, with the North-West Shelf gas project, iron ore ship loading, salt mines and other assorted industries. We rode around the town near the caravan park through areas of new housing developments where the house and land packages start at $650k, and for a four bedroom house and land package it’s around $1.1m! Out here!

I got lost about 4 times in the shopping centre car park, it’s a maze of small shops that’s been made into a big shopping complex over the years and small curved roads mixed it with the car park, it’s hard to know what's car park and what's roadway. They are going to develop a new shopping complex as well. It’s about time. Even the lady at the Tourist Information couldn’t explain where we needed to go and kept saying that her map is wrong! I didn’t feel so bad when even the locals get lost.

We went to Dampier twice, the 1^st time to see the sunset and have dinner at the Mermaid Hotel. Between us heading off late, the traffic jam nearly all the way there (17kms) and Rio Tinto’s island looming up in front of the bay we didn’t get to see much of the sunset, but we did manage to get a beer at the pub just in time to see it set behind Rio Tinto’s island. Sunset here is around 5.30pm.

The second time we went out to see the Red Dog statue and have lunch at this really nice sounding fish and chip shop I heard advertised on the radio earlier that day, right on The Esplanade. Well it shuts at 2.30pm and we drove up and down The Esplanade but never found the Fish and Chip shop! So we went to the pub for lunch as their food is very good, but they stop serving lunch at 1.45pm! Crazy place.

Right next to our Caravan Park there was a BMX track and every night it’s a light and had heaps of kids racing their BMX. We dropped in to watch them as it was a very extensive track and the kid’s races start from 6yo. They even had one 3yo racing. We watched right up to 16yo and then the open event. We got to talk to a few locals there, they are fly-in fly-out family from Perth. One month in Karratha and then back to Perth. They change their kid’s school during that time between Perth and Karratha as well.

The Touareg got a new windscreen and I had a thumb workout with positive results and reports from the Physio. So everything was achieved.

We set off after 3 nights for De Grey River Conservation Park, it’s a free camp which happened to be very good. We camped by the river along with about 50 other various vans, motorhomes and tents. We meet people Jayne recognised from Cape Range and have met a couple we spoke to there here at Cape Keraudren.

Cape Keraudren is beautiful. We’ve camped about 20m from the turquoise ocean which has a 9m tide, so the water is either close or miles away. We had lunch watching turtles swimming just in front of us. The wind was with us this morning, but it started to die down at lunch time and by mid-afternoon it had totally disappeared. Western Australia = WA = Windy Always!

Cape Kerauldren is about 500kms south of Broome and there's 13kms of dirt road to get here, but its good dirt road, so no need to even deflate the tyres. We get internet service morning and night and if you walk to the top of a small hill, take the cover off the iPhone and hold it but one bottom corner on speaker, you can make a call!

Today we might go to the swimming beach, it’s a small drive from here, but again the winds strong enough to blow a dog off its chain. We rode our bikes around yesterday morning and talked to a few of the other campers. Everyone’s so friendly. It’s nice to have enough water in the van to allow us to have showers morning and night, so be it that they are very quick showers. But with the dust and salt it’s nice to go to bed clean.

We walked out onto the rock flat yesterday at the beach at low tide, besides getting devoured by sand-flies it was really good. Jayne spotted some blue ringed octopuses and we’ve had the pictures verified on the internet. They are very nasty little critters!

I'm now trying various Sand-fly repellents including our own concoction. I hope something works for me soon.

Jayne made Margaritas last night, even in fancy glasses and all. Isn't camping tough?