Day 38-45 Exmouth -Shark Bay

It was back on the road after an interesting stay at Karratha, we were headed to Exmouth to explore the Ningaloo Reef .
  This was so different to travelling through the Pilbara mining area, we were on the coast with beautiful blue water and abuntant sealife. We caught up with a friend of my sisters who was a wealth of information on the area. Yvonne and Ross also introduced us to the wonderful world of good fish, when we were invited to their home for dinner. We had a great night.
  Shark bay was fabulous, we stayed for a few days so we could experience Monkey Mia, where the feeding of the dolphins takes place. This is very touristy but it was still worth a visit. We also took a boat cruise in which we experienced the sighting of more dolphins, sea turtles and dugongs.
  We were lucky the day was sunny and the waters calm so it was easy to see in the water and the dugongs were feeding on seagrass on the sandy bottom.
 A trip to Cape Peron was next on the agenda, this was a 4wd road which was mainly sand but the 50 or so kilometre trip was worth it, spectacular views from the cliff tops and from the beach when we reached the cape. The waters were so clear you could see sea turtles, rays and sharks from the cliffs. We also found a thorny devil lizard on the road, which we helped to the other side so he wouldn't get run over.

cruiser and camper get a wash 

Ship wreck 

Ningaloo Reef

View from lighthouse

Lighthouse

Yardie Creek

crowd at Monkey Mia

Road to Cape Peron

Cape Peron

Dolphins at Monkey Mia

Sea Turtle

Dugong

on board the Aristocat 2

calm seas

Thorny Devil Lizard

Day 32-37 Newman- Karratha

We are back on the black top now, well for a little while. Said goodbye to our travel companions , what a wonderful adventure we had together, a chance meeting that we would find such amazing people so comparable with us in such a short time., we will keep in touch.
    We arrived in Newman , a mining town in the east Pilbara region. Home of Mt Whaleback the largest single open-cut Iron Ore mine in the world, the Mt Whaleback seam is approximately 1.6 billion tonnes. It is currently 5.5km long and 2km wide.
   We went for a mine tour which was eyeopening as it is hard to imagine the size of these mines untill you see them in person.
  We stayed at Karijini National Park and walked some of the trails, exausting! but beautiful down in the gorges where there is water, as there is not much around anywhere else. The water in Karijini leaches from the artesian basin which feeds the creeks and falls.
  Ariving at Karratha was a change to see the ocean as we have been away from the coast for a while. Karratha is a mining port where the iron ore comes by rail to be loaded on ships for export. As a continuance we did a port tour of Rio Tinto's Port Lambert facility. this tour was also facinating as we were taken right into the facility whilst it is operating. We also toured historic Cossack

End of our Gunbarrel Highway adventure

Haul truck at Newman

Mt Whaleback Iron Ore mine

Operations at Mt Whaleback

Karijini National Park

circular pool at Karijini National Park

Red Dog statue at Dampier

sunset at Karratha

Day 27-31 Ayres Rock-Gunbarrel Highway

Spent a couple of days at Ayres Rock , it is amazing , had bottle of wine and nibbles while watching the sun set over the rock. We then set off on the great central road towards Warrakurna, where we plan to spend the first night. We visited the Giles weather station and saw the grader that was used to grade the famous Gunbarrel Highway. While at Warrakurna we met a couple from Victogia and we started chatting and found out that they also wanted to travel the Gunbarrel Highway but didn't want to go alone so we decided to travel together.
The next morning we went to the Giles weather station to watch the launching of the weather balloon, then it was off down the Great central road to Warburton where we fueled up and headed up the Heather highway, we were not far along when we decided to let our tyres down some more as the road condition deteriorated considerably. The going was very slow but we made it to the start of the Gunbarrel highway.
The Gunbarrel Highway is easily Len Beadell's most famous road. He and his road construction party built this road during the mid to late fifties, creating the first inland road link between western and central Australia.
  The Gunbarrel was one of a network of roads Len surveyed and built as part of the Woomera Rocket Range Project. A replica of Len Beadell's theodolite and a memorial to Len are atop Mt Beadell.
 From here we thought things would improve, but they didn't , the corrugations were quite bad as well as the washaways. We camped our first night at Camp Beadell, after a long day, we got in just on dark and we lit our camp fire and got to know our travel friends a little better.
The next camp was Geraldton Bore , the water here was really good , we could use it to clean up and cook , this night we decided to have a baked dinner. Yum!
  We were enjoying the drive as slow as it was, so many things to explore. Our next camp was at Carnegie Station, this is a cattle station set on about 1.5 million acres running jointly with neighbouring station Wongawol which is 3 million acres.
  They were running near the end of muster so the station was busy,but campground manager, Mary, still found time to sit down and chat to us about the day to day runnings of the station.
  The next morning we fueled up at the station at $2.70 per litre and headed of on what was our last days travelling with Rod and Lisbeth. We had also picked up another travelling companion,Lou.

Ayres Rock

start of the great central road

tyres air down for the Heather Highway

Camp Beadell

drinks with Mary at Carnegie Station

Gunbarrel highway construction party grader

start of the Gunbarrel highway

Lasseter's cave on the great central road

fueling up at Warrakurna

The Olgas

camels on the Great Central Road

pumping water from Geraldton Bore

Day 19-26 Alice Springs to Ayres Rock

The Summernats is a car festival held at the begining of the year in Canberra, Alice Springs held it's version over the past 4 days called the RED CENTRE NATS . This event was the first of it's kind here in Alice with all entrants being issued with a permit to drive their heavily modified car on the public streets of Alice Springs.
    Hot rods, coupes, sedans and utes, mild and wild, blowers and tubbed nothing was left out. They had a designated route and of course there were rules. We had a street parade, and the drags, the Dyno cell where entrants could have the horsepower of their vehicle measured.
Show car on display, grass driving events , a Friday night rock'n'rumble concert and of course the Burnout competition.
There were cars everywhere in town , it was car lovers paradise .
The event exceeded expectations with event merchandise selling out , they even ran out of tickets. We were told that they were to enter about 100 vehicles , at last count there were 600 or so.
So we would say the event was a success, and really good for the town of Alice Springs.
Under blue skies and quite mild temperature we left Alice bound for Ayres Rock.

Elite show cars

street parade at the Red Centre Nats

street parade

burn out competition

Day 15, 16, 17, 18 Through east and west Macdonnell Ranges

We finally got cleaned up and sorted out and headed out to the East MacDonnell Ranges after calling out to the Transport Hall of Fame.
 Visited Emily Gap and Jessie Gap which were great and then on to Ross River Homestead to camp for the night. The campground was good but the ammenities , well lets say we didn't shower that night. Got up early to travel out to N'Dhala Gorge it was a good drive with about an hours walk.
 Our next destination was over to the West MacDonnell Ranges where we visited Simpson's Gap and then to Stanley Chasm which we found very touristy.
Set up camp at Glen Helen Homestead, this is a good campground , quite old with outdated ammenities, a very popular spot once again with tourists and walkers. We spent the next couple of days based here and did a day trip to Palm Valley which was unusual seeing a lot of palms situated in one valley of rock, it was a sunny day so the one and a half hour walk was quite hot.
  Once back out on the corrugated road we headed to Hermansburg where famous Australian artist Albert Namatjira was born and grew up. Wandering through the old Historic precinct was facinating and the old buildings have been and are being restored. There are also some of Albert's original paintings here.
   Our next couple of days were spent at Kings Canyon. We had a couple of very light showers of rain which produced some spectacular rainbows, otherwise we had fine weather.
  We walked what is called "The Rim Walk" which is a 6k walk, first it starts with a climb up a mountain consisting of 500 steps straight up, it was hard going then along the ridge of the canyon , up and down mounds of layered sandstone and quite close to the edge of the canyon with amazing views, 3 1/2 hours later we walked back into the car park. We thoroughly enjoyed the day.
 We are now in Alice Springs watching all the Hot Cars roll in for the" Red Centre Nats" which comences tomorrow.

Glen Helen Homestead

on the Mereenie Loop Road

Dingo at Kings Canyon Campground

Emily Gorge

Jessie Gorge

Corroboree Rock

Ross River Campground

N'Dhala gorge

Palm Valley

Lutheran Church Hermansburg

Albert Namatjira and his wife

Albert's Painting

Part of the 500 steps to the top of the canyon

Walking trail at Kings Canyon 

Kings Canyon

Kings Canyon

Rainbow over Kings Canyon

Trucks leaving Alice

Rainbow Valley

Sand blowing up off the road