Tom Price to Karratha

When 5am rolls around its peak hour at the Tom Price Tourist Park with all the miners leaving for work.  We were glad to be moving on.

We drove along the railway road headed for Millstream National Park.  You need a permit to drive along this road so yesterday Jason had to sit through a 20 minute safety video in order to get the permit.  The road is owned by Rio Tinto and the road follows the train line between the mine at Tom Price and the port at Karratha. The other good thing is it takes 3 hours off your trip to Karratha.  We saw 3 empty trains headed for the mine and a couple of trains fully loaded with Iron Ore on their way to Karratha.  The boys thought that was pretty cool!

We had planned to stay to Snake Creek Campground but we arrived to find it was closed.  We headed to Python Pool to have a look while we decided what we would do.  We didn't want to drive the 50kms back to the other camp at Millstream so we decided to push on to Karratha instead. 

Karratha is another typical mining town, very busy and much bigger than Port Hedland.  Once again we abused the shopping centre and McDonalds while we were there.  We are only staying one night, we are keen to keep moving to head to the Coral Coast.

Nat