Category: Around Australia 2011

Ahhh Tom Price where the Iron Ore trains are only 2.5 km long. Those dedicated blog readers will know that BHPs trains in Port Hedland were 3 km long. I wonder if the Rio Tinto executives have train envy? Probably not as apparently the new mine manager, just arrived in town, is female and therefore (apologies for making sexist generalisations) does not suffer envy over the size of such things.

Yes, 2.5 km long on average with each made up of 232 carriages. Each carriage holds 114 tonnes of export grade ore (Rio guarantees their customers 62% ore content per tonne) and they load four trains per day before sending them off to Dampier. You do the math, but in short it adds up to a whole lot-a-rock. Continue reading “Day 52-53 Tom Price moving mountains” →

Who knew Port Hedland was a place where you needed to book a caravan site?! Our first rejection! A bit of a google and a few phone calls later we had a spot in South Hedland. It seems most of the caravan park space in Port Hedland is used by BHP workers. We were told the median house price in town is $600k, which no doubt makes the van parks good value! We also missed out on doing a tour of the wharf facilities because you need to book it a few days out and we weren’t staying any longer than necessary. We satisfied ourselves with a visit to the harbour to see the huge ships and a stock up at the supermarket. Greg visited the bottle shop and was queued behind about 6 guys in work gear stocking up. The prices were very good on beer… Either it is subsidised or they just buy in such bulk it is cheap? Continue reading “Day 48-51 Into the Pilbara” →

Eighty Mile Beach. A vision splendid. Which is odd because there was nothing to see. To the west is the Indian Ocean and on the evening of the 20th August it was as still as a fish tank, with scarcely a whisper of a breeze to ruffle it’s surface. To the east, a sand dune no more than three to four metres tall, topped with low lying scrub stretches away and out of sight in both directions. In between is a beach which at low tide must be close to a kilometre across and at its steepest an incline of not more than one percent. In the sky there truly was not a cloud. So as you can see there was nothing to see and yet we could not look away as the sun slowly made its way down toward the horizon creating a vast palette of changing colours on the canvas of beach, sea and sky. Continue reading “Day 46-47 Eighty Mile Beach. A vision splendid” →