The Pilbara Coast - Dampier and Karratha

After the overwhelming beauty of Karijini National Park, we headed north back to the coast. It had been so incredibly freezing overnight that I had dug out the winter pjs and second doona again, and we were looking forward to being warmer once more. We drove straight to Karratha and checked into the only caravan park in the vicinity who would take a big rig. This was very obvious because EVERY big rig in the vicinity was there – 6 buses! And one very early conversion-in-progress of our very own make. Dunc was keen to check out what Bertha looked like ‘on the inside’. LOL.

We headed straight to Dampier to see the Red Dog monument. It was the main thing we wanted to see in between Exmouth and Port Headland, and the reason for our backtrack. After patting the old fella, we grabbed some lunch in the Dampier Shopping Mall (which still looks absolutely identical to the 1970s version in the movie) and headed to the beach to eat with an amazing view.

Back at the caravan park in Karratha, we ran into another bus-living travelling family, and Dunc discovered that we had been ‘ripped off’. When we arrived, the woman in the office explained that she would have to charge us more, as we would take over 2 sites. We often take up 2 sites – its incredibly common for us to be assigned 2 back-to-back sites for our 1 big rig – but we have never been charged more to do so. Dunc was a bit taken-aback as we knew it was $44.10 for a family of four. He was charged $69 which was somewhere in the middle of two sites, but since we had no choice (no other big rig places, and we REALLY needed to charge the batteries) he forked over the cash. Well. Once we met the other family and he found out that no one else was paying more for two sites, he was MOST grumpy. Not being a confrontational sort, he didn’t storm over to the office and demand our money back. But he DID write the most scathing review on wikicamps. And signed it with his name, before we had even left yet! I spent the night expecting to be kicked out… The only good thing about the place was that we had our own personal washing line so I could dry the 4 loads of washing I had to do to get rid of the red Pilbara dust.

The next day we were out of there and headed right along the coast to a wonderful free camp we had heard so much about. De Grey’s River has 2 spots – one up on the road level, with free wifi and drop toilets, and one down along the river, tucked under the trees where the cattle roam and come to drink. Sadly we couldn’t quite get Bertha down to the river. We actually COULD have squeezed her in, but it would have been a lot of stuffing around for one night. So it was up on the road level for us, which meant that Bertha was nicely visible for our new friends to spot us when they came in.

We caught up with new friends and old friends and the kids had a ball playing with all the kids. We set them up on our bed for a screening of ‘Red Dog’ and had some lovely and peaceful quiet time outside. Well it was peaceful, until they all arrived for roast marshmallows – what else is a campfire for??

I had been promising one of our friendly families to do some soap carving for weeks now, but somehow the timing was never right. One or the other of us had to leave or we had a big day. But De Grey’s campground was the time and place – Sacha’s Holiday Program was up and running and we had 10 children carving away. I’d brought my lino carving tools with me, so had 6 sharp knives, but the youngest kids had to use butter knives. That was rather a relief as the ages ranged from 6 to 14yo and I was safety conscious… 8yo and under had blunt knives and the others had to share my tools.

At the end of the session, we had a few cute little soaps and an enormous tray of carvings! So what else to do but smush it all into one enormous soap ball and clean the table down? We all actually quite like our huge soap now – it fits neatly on the basin and is easy to hold when using. Its so large that the children have even given it a name – Bob. I might recycle the other smaller soaps I made into another huge ball when Bob eventually gets used up.