On a lucky tip from the old owner at Port Smith Caravan Park, we travelled the Bore Line road, which did have a lot of interesting country to see, all lovely, rocky outcrops, hills, etc.
Today we're in Marble Bar. This place is pretty cool, a nice, very neat town with a couple of historic stone buildings from the 1900s, a history of gold mining. The caravan park has grass - yeeha.
Right: at the visitor centre.
Left: the many many languages of the Pilbara, at the visitor centre.
Day 1, went to the local natural pools. The water is a bit low and green for swimming. We had a lunch and got an odd dust shower. The food was still ok.
In the arvo we went to Comet gold mine. Gerald the host from Holland told us many fascinating facts about it. It extracted about $200 million worth of gold. At least half probably went out in the pockets of the workers. The discovery of gold is completely luck. There's sure to be a whole pile more in the mountain, but it may not be worth trying to dig all that dirt. The rocks contain arsenic, so need to be heated up to release this before they could crush the rock for extraction. The chimney is hopefully high enough to send the vapours elsewhere on the wind. Sorry for the surrounding areas. Seems gold is not the most environmentally friendly.
Left: walking around while black, no trials, identification or evidence necessary. Owners of the land were pushed off, then chained up when they took some food while starving, after their own lands were ruined and converted to European style farms.
Night one - had one beer at the pub, set up, chatted to travellers.
Day 2, went out to the secret ww2 air base - Corunna Downs. It is spread over a wide area with the old camps, plane parking, 2 runways, and taxi way. The main runway is 2.3kms long, so a jumbo could still land there if it's in trouble. It used to be sealed but has long since been graded enough to scrape off the bitumen. It's funny that the Japanese never found it. It was deliberately placed out of range of their fighters. Our bombers could reach their bases however.
Corunna was used to strike Japanese bases in Java. The Japanese tried to find the base, but never did.
Left: you can see the airstrip in this photo.
Marble Bar is a pretty town.
The Iron Clad hotel.
Up at the bar with fellow travellers Richard and Penny. It happens pretty often that you bump into the same people along the road.
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