Karajini to Exmouth:

Leaving Karaijini with the car and us covered in red dirt, we headed towards Tom Price which is a mining town. As we drove in we saw green lawns which was a pleasant surprise after all the dust. It is a very small town which was owned by the mines and no one could live there unless you were working in the mine. It was sold to the newly formed council for a dollar and now lots of young families live there.

I decided to go on a mine tour to learn
about the open cut mining and see some of their huge equipment. The mine is owned by Rio Tinto. We had to don hard hats and safety glasses and wear covered in shoes. When we boarded the bus, we were warned of the huge fines for not wearing these on site - $25,000 for us and $50,000 for the driver – all to do with work place health and safety.As we approached the mine entrance we had to go through the mine security gates.
We saw some of the huge trucks
that cart the ore from the mine to the crusher. The wheels are huge and to replace a tyre costs about
$100,000 each and they only last about 8 months. There are also huge bulldozers and water trucks. One million dollars worth of fuel is used in one week.
The ore in the area is of such high grade that any thing under 50% is discarded no matter what other minerals it contains even gold so the high grade ore is very valuable.
Once the ore is crushed it is place in a great heap and these are loaded directly into a huge train by a big machine that sends it along a conveyor belt.
The also have s tunnel and the ore is loaded from the top. One car of the train can be loaded in 35 mins by this method. The train then which takes the ore to Dampier to be put directly into the ships to be exported around the world to bre made into steel.
The bus took us to a lookout where we could look out and survey the activity and see the size of some of the equipment. We had to get special clearance to go on the road and make sure no trucks were coming. The bus driver radioes the controller who is on site. In a few weeks this controller will be in Perth. All the trains are controlled from Perth. Of course the whole area is very dusty and they have to be careful to control the dust so a huge water truck waters the road continually. After the lookout we drove all around the loading equipment so there are masses of steel structures.Just as well we haves lot of the iron ore!!

Tom Price was an American out here on a field trip looking for some aggregate for the roads when he came to the Pillbra. He was amazed at the amount and quality of the iron ore he saw here and was intrumential in convincing to the government to lift the embargo on exporting iron ore. The company was hesitant to set up a mining operation because of the expense of setting up the infra structure – roads, railway lines, ports and towns but he assured then there were billions of dollars in those hills which turned our to be true. There is enough ore for at least another 40 years!!
One trainload of ore is worth about 5 million dollars and the mine operates 24 hours a day.
This was a very interesting tour with lots of facts and figures which I have forgotten.

After the tour we did some shopping and then headed towards Exmouth. We passed through some hilly country with lots of red prodruding – plenty more ore around Im sure. We stayed in a free camp by a dry river bed and had some drinks with our neighbours -all queenslanders.
We enjoyed our meal cooked over the fire and we were glad to use the wood we had carted around before Karajini (couldnt have a fire there as it was so dry). The next morning we headed off again and the countryside was very flat with stunted trees and some with trunks twisted into amazing shapes. They look like large bonsai. There is a lot of gibber and not much grass and the country looks very poor.

We saw some extremely thin cattle that were trying to find a green pick on the side of the road. It was very sad. Once again we free camped near a dry river bed that had lots of white river gums scattered around. Although it was quite windy we used up the rest of the wood.

We left very early as we wanted to get to Exmouth by 10am as we hadn’t booked in and we had heard there wasn’t much availability as lots of people from Perth come and say for three months to get away from the cold. We were very lucky to get an “overflow” site in the CP and it was a really good site.
As we passed through some more flat land we excited to see some purple wild flowers along the side of the road and there is lots of wattle starting to come out. As we neared Exmouth the land is very flat and hardly any trees at all.
We settled into our site and had loads of washing to do to get rid of all the red dust and we had to catch up on the shopping.
Exmouth is one side of the peninsular and on the other side is Ningaloo Reef which of the coast in the Cape Range National Park. You can walk off the beach and snorkel and we will be staying here so am looking forward to that.