Day 27

Tom Price - Mine Tour - Karijini National Park

" I make hamburgers I get all the girls, and I take 'em out to dinner and I give them all the world..."

Tom Price is a drinking town that has a mining problem! - so said our tour bus operator this morning on our tour of the open cut iron ore mine that really is the town. There is nothing in Tom Price that dosent either run or support the Rio Tinto operation. They are only set up to mine iron ore and it gets processed, dumped on a train - an extremely long train as we found out last night - chugged to Derby and shipped out to China. Apparently once the Chinese have had enough the Indians will put up their hands for it.

The open cut mine is 15ks wide and 8 k's deep. Small by Kalgoorlie standards but pretty bloody large anyway. The bus tour took us deep into the operation and right next to the big loaders that haul 260 tonnes of ore in each load - just massive! The tyres were higher than our bus! We had a great morning watching the 24x7 operation in play.

After the tour we shopped and fueled and headed for the Karijini National Park. It's the 2nd largest park in Western Australia and we'll spend a few days here hiking the multiple gorges that the park boasts. We did a quick 2 km rim walk this afternoon of Dales Gorge where our campground is just before sun down and saw some impressive cliff walls that drop hundreds of metres to the gorge floor below.

Tomorrow we'll be driving about the rusty red top into all the places on offer here. As we drove in to the park on the black top, our half of the road was black and the other deep red. I will post a pic - you go in clean obviously and come out all rusty red!

We made hamburgers tonight for dinner - enjoyed by all!

Dingoes are a problem here too so no bins about and all food must be kept securely inside. Haven't seen any yet but I'm sure they will visit in the night. I was surprised I didn't get a visit cooking outside in the dark tonight !