Karijini really is a jewel in the Pilbara landscape but the Pilbara coastline still has a lot to offer. After leaving Karijini, we had to double back on ourselves and leave the same way we came in as the road we had planned to take to Karratha was still closed from the heavy rain. A big day of driving from Tom Price (bull bar safely tucked away inside the caravan!) and we found ourselves at the little beachside town of Onslow.

The history of Onslow seems to be largely centred around pearling, farming and gold mining. It’s a small town but randomly has two caravan parks. Options for free camps here in WA are limited and we seem to find ourselves in peak season for this part of the country as the weather gets cooler down south and people migrate north for the winter. The caravan park overlooking the beach was full so we found ourselves a little way out of town at perhaps the most random ‘caravan park’ we have found so far. After speaking with the owner of the camp site, it turns out that the place offers temporary accommodation for the miners working in the area. Apparently they had 200 miners a night staying at the time we were there and that will double to around 400 a night in a few months as there are some major projects happening on the local mines. It really gave us an insight into the local industry which is the heart of the Pilbara region and the WA mining powerhouse. With its numerous mines, the Iron ore and liquified natural gas industries of the Pilbara region are valued at more than $70 billion AUD and represents more than 70% of mineral and energy production in WA, the scale of which is just insane to see. It’s no wonder there are so many HUGE road trains on the road!

300km ‘up the road’ from Onslow, we set up camp in Karratha for a few nights of logistics! Thankfully, being a large, heavy industry area, finding someone to re-weld our bull bar was no drama and people finally stopped asking us if we had hit a roo! Karratha is bigger than I thought it would be and a great place for us to restock the van and find random spare parts for things.

Keeping moving on our journey, we hit the road again and covered another 350km to get up to Pardoo Station. We are in the part of the country where there are long distances to travel with very little in between.

Sitting on over 200,000 hectares of land, Pardoo is a working cattle station with an area set up as a campsite. Clearly it’s a well known spot as the place was pretty busy and had a nice feel around the camp site. We took a drive down along some of the 4WD tracks and found ourselves down on the mud flats – endless fun!

The mud flats offered some pretty awesome scenery for sunset and Kiera caught her first fish of the trip!

After two nights at Pardoo, we hit the road for one night stop at Eighty Mile beach where it felt like we had found an oases in the desert. After days and days or red dirt, we found ourselves surrounded by green grass and frangipani trees. Once again, a large property has been converted into a caravan park by the beach and the place was packed with travellers heading north and south along the highway. Eighty mile beach offered some spectacular shell collection options and the kids (feeling creative) built their own coral reef on the beach from random things they found washed up on the shore.

Only one night at Eighty mile then we hit he road again to cover another 300km to get us to Barn Hill Station. Thoroughly over the long drives and short stays in places, we opted for three nights at Barn Hill to slow things down a little. More red dirt, and a few cattle gates later, and we found ourselves at another little gem of a camp set up on the headland overlooking a stunning coastline.

Of the three stops we had planned between Karratha and Broome, I think Barn Hill was our pick. You know you are in the tropics when there is coral in the rock pools! The coastline still has that dramatic red rock of the Pilbara coast and there is no other way to describe it other than stunning.

We seem to have covered a lot of ground over the last few weeks, heading from Exmouth through to Karijini and up the Pilbara coast. Next stop Broome and then on into the Kimberley Region and the ‘top end’ of WA.