The Road Trip. Exmouth to Tom Price.

I am a week or two behind with my travels now with everything from the whalesharks to Perth to fill in and much of the detail already disappearing behind me. After the whalesharks I had a week ahead of me in Exmouth and there simply isn't enough to do there if you are a girl alone with no wheels. I did know I was too full of emotion to sit still for a week, so with the memory of the last great WA Road Trip in mind I trotted off down to the car hire place before my worries could catch me up and in my best can do frame of mind hired myself something big enough and clever enough to take on the big distances, the road trains and the heat.

After stocking up with more water than I could drink in a week, food enough for a couple of days, a 3 CD compilation of power ballads and having put out the word of where I would be and when and at what time to get worried if there had been no call I took to the road.

The distances to be covered between anywhere in the Pilbara are considerable. On the first day I planned to drive from Exmouth south and then east to meet the northwest coastal highway, then north on the highway to the Nanutarra Roadhouse, and then east across nothing to reach Paraburdoo and then Tom Price, where I'd stay for the night. ABout 650 kilometres in all.
I thought the driving might be dull or difficult but I was looking forward to Tom Price and checking in to the motel before heading on to the national park the next day.

I thought the Pilbara was a desert and I liked the sound of me 'crossing the Pilbara'. I've realised since that the Pilbara is a bigger area than one desert and includes the coastal regions, the sand plains, the industrial towns and the deep river gorges. What it seems to have in common is the rich iron deposits in the earth which account for the rich red soil and the rich rich mining.



As with the train trip across the Nullabor (which on checking is also not a desert but a plain composed of the world's largest single piece of limestone!) the scenery was always changing even though it was always the same - red dirt, greenery and blue sky. The red dirt changed from pink to orange to deep sienna; rocks from orange to pink to purple slate. The greenery changed from straw to pale green, from tall grasses to clumps of spinifex.



Even some of the trees were red.



There wasn't a great deal else to see on the road. The occasional other vehicle, the odd bit of roadkill, huge rocky outcrops that came and went. The radio kept me company and I listened to the last day of western australia's last urban stock yards in action (it took me a good half an hour to realise that country hour was not country and western hour). I was hardly a pioneer woman crossing the great outback, with my organic cafe made sundried tomato and ricotta penne and a bottle of red wine in my cool bag and yet there was a real sense of satisfaction at covering the distances easily and in watching the world go by.

I was quite content with my lot then when I drove in to Tom Price mid afternoon and for a mining town in the middle of nowhere it has plenty going for it with 2 ovals, an outdoor cinema and a very new bright blue swimming pool. My anticipation of liking the place lasted only until I found myself sleeping in an A frame hut in the tourist park at the cost of 185 dollars for the privilege of a place that smelt strongly of old gravy. I'd thought that the woman at the Motel didn't like the look of me when she told me that they were full and to try calling the tourist park. I drove myself out there to find that the tourist park was also full and I was still trying to work out where that left me (in the middle of nowhere with nowhere to sleep with dusk coming on and the kangaroos lining up at the roadside to play chicken with the traffic in the dark) when the man heard from a regular that he wasn't coming in till the next day and I could have his room at that bargain price. You can't haggle over the last room in town, can you?

So I ate my fancy pasta and drank my red wine and watched the hundreds of cockatoos that were gathered in the trees outside and I took myself off to bed early wondering what exactly I was doing there in the middle of nowhere and planning to be up and out in the fresh air and off to Karijini bright and early.

And that is a tale for another day.