Day 37 – Broome to Port Hedland

This morning we left lovely Broome at about 7.30am (and the Kimberley region behind), and headed 613km down the road to Port Hedland. The Pilbara has long been a favourite part of Australia of ours, and we were looking forward to visiting it again.

It was a long day in the car, only stopping twice at Sandfire and Pardoo roadhouses for fuel and toilet stops. Lunch was at Pardoo, and these two roadhouses were only very, very basic – but as always you could buy a beer from the onsite taverns if you wanted one.

We arrived into the very industrial port city of Port Hedland at about 4pm. It is one of the worlds largest and busiest harbours, filled with huge ships from all nations that transport millions of tonnes of cargo each year to distant places. After dropping off the van at the Cooke Point Caravan Park (Big 4), we headed into town to explore. Firstly we stopped off at the Koombana Lookout to take in the magnificent views across the harbour. I  counted 27 huge ships waiting in line to come into the port.

 

Then it was down to Maraikurrinya Park which overlooks the port, and gives a great view of the Iron Ore ships coming in and out of the harbour.

 

We booked ourselves into the recently opened Seafarers Port tour for tomorrow afternoon. This is a tour run by the Mission to Seafarers, and we have heard great reports about it from other people, so are keen to give it a go. Next we drove out to  Redbank Bridge, a wonderful lookout point to watch the BHP Billiton Iron Ore trains moving along the start of the 426km track from the port to the Mt Whaleback mine at Newman. (Rod, my faithful blog reader – these pics are for you!). Brendan was fascinated to watch the huge, heavy trains carting the iron ore into BHP.

Nearby, was the huge salt pile and evaporation ponds, owned and run by Rio Tinto. Last time we were here Dampier Salt owned them, so it looks like Rio Tinto must have bought them out. A great place to watch the sun set, over the glowing, shimmering salt pile (well, that was me – Brendan was off getting as close to the huge, 3km long trains as humanly possible!). For those who know him well, would you expect anything else?