Power Rangers Next stop on our itinerary was the Ningaloo Reef, a long stretch of coral reefs, in the Cape National Park, which is accessed through the town of Exmouth. The idea was to spend the night in a rest area not too far from town, so we could arrive at Exmouth at 9 am and book into a site in the national park. Well, things didn't go exactly according to plan. Firstly, the rest area we had planned on was 150 Kms from town, on the highway, at the turn off...

Red Dog Country Our next stop was the Pilbara Coast, which covered many towns including Karratha, Roeburne, Cossack, Point Samson, and Dampier - made famous by the Red Dog movie. The Pilbara is the region south of the Kimberleys between the Great Sandy Desert and the sea. And it is most famous for one thing - mining, mining, mining. From Port Hedland down to Dampier are several ports where the iron ore is shipped out to sea, where further inland are the huge mi...

What a Pearler! Broome. Next stop after Derby is Broome, an oasis of life and civilization after a long dry spell. Broome is a lovely little town, based around two main things - the pearling industry, and Cable Beach. We pulled into town on a Saturday morning, and our first port of call was the market. This had all your generic bits of market paraphernalia - handmade goods, some produce, some art and craft - and a whole lot of pearls. They were everywhere, and ...

Wild Wild West After Kununurra there is a lot of wide open empty country as we headed west. There was about 200 kms of nothing until we reached the Bungle Bungles, then a whole lot more nothing after. This is mostly flat open country full of cattle stations, with the cows spread fairly sparsely across it. However because it is so big, most of it is not fenced, so every now and then we would see some cows grazing right on the highway. That is not such a problem, ...

Bungle Bungles Although the Bungle Bungles have been around for thousands of millions of years, only a very small number of people knew about them until the 1980s. At that time the Western Australian Tourist Bureau sent a photographer to the Kimberleys to take a few photos for their brochures. He had a friend who was a helicopter pilot in Kununurra, and he had noticed an unusual rock formation in his flights, and took him there. He took some aerial photos of tho...