Mon, 13th to Tues, 14th June - 40 Mile Beach

Monday was another windy, windy day - not nice for towing a caravan.  We drove about 150kms to a place called 40 Mile Beach that had been recommended to us.  Another busy place, but we managed to find a spot a little bit sheltered in the scrub.  We stayed in the van until about 4:30pm as it was too windy to do anything else.  Luckily, we had some games to play and reading to do.  When we eventually ventured out to have a look around, we were a bit disappointed as it is very swampy with a very rocky beach area.  We decided to only stay the one night and move on to somewhere nicer (hopefully).

On Tuesday we left 40 Mile Beach before the wind had a chance to come up again and drove 70kms into Karratha.  We filled with water at the Visitors' Centre ($4 donation) and asked where we could find a laundromat.  By the way, how can it be a donation if you are asked for a set amount?  Anyway, it turned out we had to drive into Dampier to go to a laundromat, about 26kms away as Karratha doesn't have one.  Eventually we found the laudromat which was actually just a couple of washing machines inside the Dampier Transit Caravan Park (the Visitors' Centre lady didn't tell us that).  We decided to set up camp in the park and make use of the facilities and then Rick went to speak to the caretaker to pay the $24 for the night.  She told him she was booked out, but after smiling nicely at her, she allowed us to stay where we we had already set up.  We still didn't have mobile phone reception or internet without our external aerial, and we couldn't connect to water or run our shower water into a sullage pit (we had to collect it in a bucket), but we did have power and access to a couple of washing machines.  There isn't much in Karratha and it is a bit swampy with no real beaches to speak of.  Dampier was a much nicer spot with access to the ocean across the road. 

In the evening it was still very windy, so we walked a couple of hundred metres up the road to an accommodation place set up mainly for miners, rather than try to barbecue. We went into the huge mess hall where it cost $25 per head for all you could eat of four courses. No alcohol could be consumed at all, but plenty of juice and cordials and/or tea and coffee were provided. The food was excellent and it was all well presented.

From the front of the Caravan Park we had an excellent view of the North West Shelf Gas plant and the ships waiting to be loaded.  In the evening the lights made it look like a small city and there was continual noise throughout the night.

Our camp in the scrub at 40 Mile Beach

40 Mile Beach at low tide with its rocks and red sand

Looking towards the ocean from our site in the Dampier Transit Park