2021 - QLD-NT-WA-SA-VIC-NSW-QLD: Day 77: Tue 6 Jul - Port Hedland to a Free Camp (Behind the Hill at Truck Bay), 126 km; total towed: 7 639 km

12-28 degC, fine, sunny with a breeze, perfect really

Last night we discussed whether to continue with our stay at Port Hedland, or move on. There was nothing really left for us to do as the tours were not operating, and we had seen just about all there was worth seeing (worth to us, anyway). Also, not far from the Turf Club is a number of 24/7 railway lines (there's a total of eight coming into the Port) which carry iron ore trains 3 km long, and some of the ship loading facilities that they are heading to. Although not that loud, (except at 1-3am) the noise is constant, and for us bushies it's a bit sleep disrupting. So we decided to move on today. We now have another day spare before our booking in Newman starts. We had breakfast then went for a ride back into town to do some of the art and heritage trail we didn't do yesterday. This included a visit to Dalgety House Museum, which wasn't really even worth the $3 entry fee each. We also toured the Court House Gallery which had some half decent pieces of art showing. Time for a coffee. We wanted to have it at the Silver Star Café; the Silver Star once being the dining car of a famous train, the General Pershing Zephyr (never heard of it). There were four people in front of us in the queue, the second one ordered 5 ham and cheese croissants, five banana breads, and hearing that, Wendy left the queue and we went back to the van and brewed up there. Our little Nespresso machine makes a pretty good brew, just the way we like it, every time.

We left the Turf Club free camp just after 11 am. First stop was at the dump point, and second stop was at a lookout from which you can view the salt mine and salt stacks. This is one of the world's largest solar salt farms with about 9 000 ha of crystallising beds. They produce about 3.2 million tonnes of salt which is 99.9% NaCl. Interestingly, the large majority of it (70%) is destined for chemical production (caustic soda, chlorine, detergents, plastics, glass, industrial chemicals, and road de-icing), whilst only 20% is used in food processing. The other 10% is used for other stuff. It takes 60 million tonnes of seawater to produce 1 million tonnes of salt. Most of the salt is sold to Asian countries.

We were then on the road again, heading in the direction of Newman. We left a little later than we usually do because we didn't want to drive too far and be in Newman before Thursday. Lunch was taken at a gravel pit pullover, and not long after that we found this secluded free camp that Wikicamps calls "Behind the Hill at Truck Bay". We chose it because we wanted to get as far away from the road as possible to avoid the constant noise of bulk carrying trucks. In the 126km we did today we saw 70 four bogie trucks traveling in the opposite direction and this happens 24/7.

We did some more star gazing and with nil ambient light it was pretty speccy.

Some interesting stats on Port Hedland:

500 km of conveyor belts; 538 mil tonnes of export per year; that will grow to 1,000 mil tonnes in the next year or so; the bulk carriers are 360m X 60m and carry $70mil worth of iron ore; 1 in 12 WA jobs are there or connected to the place; the tugs are 710 tonnes; there are sensors under the water in the harbour so that they can move ships with as little as 25cm of clearance; the place uses 1,000,000 l of fuel a DAY and there's 100s of billions of dollars tied up in infrastructure.