Day 39 – Port Hedland to Tom Price

This morning we left the interesting town of Port Hedland at about 7.30am and headed to the outback mining town of Tom Price. It was quite a long drive, and nowhere to stop on the way.  As we got closer to the magnificent Hamersley Ranges, the landscape changed from flat, treeless plains, to beautiful, dark red, rocky mountains, covered in the prettily tufted Spinifex grasses. I mentioned to Brendan that it was so pretty, it looked as though it had been purposely landscaped. As we approached Karajini, we started to see the most spectacular vista of wildflowers open up before us. First it was just the pretty purple mulla mulla flowers, but soon it was bright white flowers and yellow ones as well. I must find out their names.

 

 

The beauty of the rocky hills around us is just so hard to describe, and even more difficult to catch on camera, and of course there is also the odd Rio Tinto engine rumbling past.

 

After arriving in Tom Price we parked the van at the only caravan park in town (quite nice actually – nice big sites), made ourselves a quick lunch (it was 1pm by now), and then headed down into the town to have a look around, and visit the Information Centre. We wanted to book ourselves in to the Rio Tinto Mine Tour.

Then we decided to drive out to Hamersley Gorge, which we remembered was so beautiful from our last visit. It was about a 40min drive out to the gorge, mostly on dirt, but it was quite a good road, as it had just been graded and wet down. As it was still wet, an amazing amount of butterflies were flying around all the beautiful wildflowers, and landing on the road – possibly to get a little of the moisture.

 

Hamersley Gorge is absolutely spectacular, with its astonishing color variances, beautiful reflections, and complex geological formations that seem to run the rock veins in all directions.

We all had a swim around in the very cool, quite deep pools at the base of the small waterfall. We were very privileged to have this beautiful place to ourselves. We agreed that this had to be one of the most beautiful places we have ever seen in Australia.

 

After spending the afternoon exploring the area, we headed back into Tom Price, and had a drive around (yep, looking at the big trains). Well, at least Brendan was, I was distracted by the huge variety of wildflowers all around us.