08 Feb - Broome

Well since we last wrote we have been busy busy bees, covering 1500km, but having a blast. We left Ningaloo Reef and headed for Karijini NP, famous for its gorges and natural spring swimming holes. The day we visited was 35-40 degrees so we kept our observing to most of the lookouts as the climb in and out of the gorge would have been quite a feet. The info booklet had a scoring system for the intensity of each walk/hike so we picked one in particular with a swimming spot and off we went. On the way down I (Em) found the trek quite easy, descending about 250 rock steps until Rob reminded me, what goes down must come up (in our case anyway). We ended up at ‘circular pool’ and it was beautiful. Defiantly a highlight of our trip with little waterfalls creating natural showers.

We then drove on to Port Hedland, largest Port in Australia distributing Iron Ore, mainly to Asia. Here we decided to take some time just to sit and watch, its amazing how much the ships can hold. We watched a ship get loaded with 167,000 tons of Iron Ore - that’s the equivalent of 66,800 of our hilux.
Its also a very expensive place to live. Chatting with a local, houses go for $700 a week rent - minimum. I don’t think we will decide to stop permanently in Port Hedland.

rob escaping the flies just out of port hedland.
Next stop is where I write this blog. Broome. We arrived on Saturday about 6pm, decided to spoil ourselves and looked into a motel with air-conditioning. We decided to go for the only thing apart from a bar that was open on a Saturday night and went to the open air sun cinemas. We decided to drive there as we didn’t know exactly where the cinema was located and ended up parking 100mts down the road from our motel after going the long way around. We watched a strange Will Smith movie called ‘seven pounds’ which we didn’t understand the plot until about 2/3 of the way through. Being out first cinema experience since well before we left we enjoyed the night out. Today we spent the day trying to be touristy but no attractions are open until Monday 9 am so the extent was a swim at cable beach.
It was here in Broome where we started to hear a grinding noise and vibration from the back right wheel, thinking ‘this can’t be good’ we began the process of elimination. We have (rob has) concluded that it is the rear wheel bearing, thankfully Rob had the foresight to bring spares but with the requirement of a special tool/machine we are headed to a mechanic in the morning. We hope he isn’t too busy and unable to help us. We don’t really want to hang around here any more than we have to, with the humidity at 80% (seriously), so we’ll probably have to do some negotiating, but hopefully not!
We will let you know how we go in a few days!
Over and out!