A Long Stay in Port Hedland

Mon, Tues, 28-29 July

This morning Dave toddled off on his bike with the sleek grey trailer behind, eager to get the new trailer tyres fitted, as planned last Thursday. But soon he was back at camp saying "Not Happy! Grrr!" The big helpful Maori guy who had "ordered" the tyres had forgotten to put the order through! So we have to stay in Port Hedland 3 more days, waiting for the order to be done properly. The young woman serving Dave had said this time: "You can kill me if they don't arrive Wednesday." She also had tried to source the tyres from other places in South Hedland, so she was doing her best.

Never mind; I was too worried anyway to go off riding anywhere, knowing Orlena was going through brain surgery today. Maybe we are meant to stay put near an airport for a few days?

We are staying at Point Cooke Caravan Park, a Big4 place that is very pleasant, with rather nice views of mangrove and tidal flat land, with Pretty Creek running by full of winter rain water. I hadn't expected big industrial Port Hedland to have a pretty side to it, but we are camped overlooking this coastal bird life place.

We made use of our unplanned extra time to visit the Dalgety House Museum, which proved to be more interesting than we expected, especially the audio CD that we listened to in old fashioned cane armchairs. A very good explanation of traditional Aboriginal culture to start with, followed by lots of interesting stories told by some old timers about life around Port Hedland and Marble Bar. We heard about cyclones and floods and the difficulties the people had to deal with, and how much they enjoyed their lives anyway. The big iron ore companies have brought a lot of money into the community since then, but Port Hedland has had a long and interesting history before this.

We have noticed how all the houses here are built to withstand cyclones, as the coastline between here and Exmouth is very prone to cyclones.

Cooking the evening meal here at the camp kitchen is a lot of fun, due to the variety of campers we are meeting. We have really enjoyed chatting to two German women, Hilda and Barbara, who are bicycling round Australia. They have already cycled 13,000km and today they headed off to Broome, expecting to take 8 days to get there, with a stopover camp set up at Eighty Mile Beach for a bit of a longer break. They haven't got an ounce of excess weight on them, due to their fitness, unlike me! They seem so organised and happy with their mode of transport, as well as being interesting people to chat about the world with.

Tuesday 30 July

I slept in till 8am today, finding Dave already up tapping away on our laptop to do his turn at blogging. A lovely sunny day again, 29 degrees. So we went for a stroll for a couple of hours to explore the mangrove coastal land in front of us. It was so relaxing seeing the ocean meet up with the mangrove wetlands. We got squirted at by some octopuses (Octopi?) as we walked across tidal rock pools. This was funny….not such clever creatures because they gave away their hiding spots by aggressively squirting water out at us. We had heard stories of occasional crocodiles being sighted here but for once I wasn't worried. However, I would have bolted away faster than Usain Bolt if I had seen one! Dave had left the camera back in the tent, so I took some lovely coastal shots with my little mobile phone camera; these came out quite good pictures. A very relaxing morning, close to coastal nature.

Then we went 2-up on Dave's bike for a ride to South Hedland which is a big new section of urban development. Because of Port Hedland being all peninsula-land, it is spatially very confusing to know which direction is which. It's even doing Dave's head in, so it's not just me! We saw the huge long iron ore trains which seem to be running along the shoreline to ships constantly. And dominating the skyline is a huge mountain pile of white salt, evaporated from sea water.

Tomorrow the trailer tyres better be ready, otherwise Dave has permission to kill someone! I said I'd help him too.

But really, Port Hedland is ok, a nice surprise having time to catch up on reading and blogging. Hopefully we'll be ready to ride to Broome on Thursday, a 610km trip. We have already pre-booked a powered tent site at the Cable Beach Caravan Park, as all the tourist towns are fully booked with grey nomads and backpackers at this time of the year.

Port Hedland Patty