Eighty Mile Beach to Marble Bar

The priority for the morning was to get down to Eighty Mile Beach for a look. After having been so close for so long it seemed a little strange that there would not be more access. A friendly soul in our free camp overnight delayed us until 8am, but was full of all sorts of information of questionable value, and wanted a chat, so we could hardly refuse.

The only access to the beach was at the 80 mile beach caravan park, which he said was “wiped out in the cyclone, and there’s nothing there, but they still take your money.” Looked pretty much like a caravan park to me, but we didn’t need to go in to get to the beach.

And what a beach it was. Wide, flat, white sand, gentle waves breaking from a blue ocean, lots of birds and shells, warm, sunny and a light breeze blowing. A few people content to stand there not catching fish, and an empty Coastwatch tent with unfriendly quarantine signs, and some highly secure beach lounge chairs.

It still felt a little early in the morning, so we didn’t swim, but contented ourselves with a walk, collecting shells and coral along the way.

It was hard to drag ourselves away, but the sun was rising high and we had no sunscreen on, so it was off to the Pardoo Roadhouse for lunch and some planning. A good choice, because not only did it have basic groceries, it also had maps on the wall, gas, water, diesel and air. We decided to go with the original plan of Marble Bar, Newman, Karajini then Port Hedland, rather than direct to Port Hedland.

So it was pretty much straight south, into the Pilbara. I’m not sure I knew what to expect, but it wasn’t what we saw. The Pilbara is a place of iron ore mining, so I expected some more red rocks, and those we did see. However, as we left the green Roebuck Plains, which where flat as far as the eye could see (see head photo) we actually came into green rolling hills. Now admittedly the green was primarily spinifex, but the overall effect felt rather more Yorkshire Dales than you might have expected. I of course completely failed to photograph those.

Marble Bar is a town of my childhood. Whether I remember it as being the main town in some ABC drama series set in the remote country around here, or as the town with the distinction of having recorded the highest temperature in Australia I’m not really sure, but it was one place that I kind of always wanted to visit, and now I’m here. And I can tell you that at the moment it is not living up to the hottest place on the hottest continent reputation. At the moment it really feels like we have come 200km south inland, and 200m up, and the thermometer dropping to the depths of 16 deg had me digging around for a jumper.

Tomorrow we will go and look for the bar of Marble Bar, which is apparently jasper, and not marble. We will stay in rock territory for quite some time, with fossicking soon giving way to the big boy stuff of huge iron ore mines.

p.s. Hello Kedron State School. See if you can get this projected over parade!