Broome, 80 Mile Beach and Port Hedland

3/8/2015

Spent the morning in Broome and Cable Beach, enjoying the sun and warm temperatures and having a few coffees. There is a cool butcher selling free range meats from stock raised in the Kimberleys in Chinatown, so I filled up my fridge with heaps of goodies.

World famous Cable Beach

I drove to 80 Mile Beach – a drive that was substantially longer than I expected – but well worth it. The beach is amazing and another huge coincidence happened: when I pulled into my camp site, I saw the Britz campervan of the two Swiss girls parked up next to me. That is the third time I met them (once in Wyndham on the camp site, once in Turkey Creek at the fuel station and now here). We had a good laugh about it – I jokingly accused them of following me when I saw them at the fuel station – this time I was jokingly being accused.

We had dinner together and shared our stories. Really cool stuff. The sunset was sensational on the pristine beach and the night sky full of stars and a nicely visible milky-way as there is no light pollution around. So cool out here!

80 Mile Beach

80 Mile beach is just a caravan park in the middle of nowhere, 10km away from the highway and hundreds of kilometers away from a town. But it is, in my opinion, more beautiful here than on famous Cable Beach!

Distance traveled: 390km

4/8/2015

Went down to the beach after breakfast to find out that the sea was very far out – tidal changes here are very high (and even more so due to the almost full moon if I'm correct) and the seabed very flat. I met two Australians that said they walked out for 35 minutes and still didn't reach the water. I guess that means no swimming in the morning unless I want to wait until high tide!

Drove all the way down to Port Hedland – BHP's main iron ore export terminal. I saw one of the huge ore carriers leaving – these vessels are around 300m long and carry up to 260 000 tons of ore – with the vast majority going to ports in China.

According to Wikipedia, Port Hedland has Australia's largest bulk cargo throughput, unbelievable 372 million tonnes a year! All the ore is transported to Port Hedland via train lines from the Pilbara.

Vessel arrivals	2,447 (2014)
Annual cargo tonnage	372,301,352 tonnes (2013-2014)

Grabbed a coffee in the Silver Star coffee shop – a little cafe situated in an old train wagon. Cool idea. As I'm heading into Karijini National park next for a few days, I'll have to buy enough food to last me for several days and fuel up the car again.