2006/07 Australia trip - Tom Price |
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Hearing that the Coral Bay area was likely to be full, there didn’t seem much point in heading to the coast anywhere until the school holidays were over, so we decided to stay in the Pilbara. We also needed to find a campground with water and propane 
as both were running low. We left Karijini and drove to the town of Tom Price via the Banjima Drive. This is a really scenic road with green hills and mountains on either side and great cliffs and outcrops of red rock. The road is orange and it was lined with big clumps of mulla mulla, a pretty plant with large cones of purple flowers. There were also yellow pea plants and the occasional dash of red. Western Australia is renowned for its wildflowers, particularly in a wet year, and it looked like we were there at the right time.
We checked in at the Tom Price Tourist Park, all very civilized with the caravans in a neat row, and went to check out the visitor
centre in town and use its Internet. Tom Price is a company town, built for the workers at the iron mine, one of the richest in the world. The town is named after Tom Price, who found the mountain that was almost pure iron, so pure that people say you can weld the rock. We were surprised to find the prettiest company town 
we’ve ever seen, with nice looking homes, trees, flowers, parks, and artistic murals, even inside the bus shelters.
Our next stop was going to be the Millstream-Chichester park, another place of canyons and waterfalls, away from the coast, and hopefully less busy, and to get there we had to drive on the “railway maintenance road” owned by one of the railways that carry the iron ore. So, first we had to watch a video about safety and then sign away all our rights in order to get a permit to drive the road.
The campground is at the foot of Mount Nameless, a quite impressive blob of red rock overlooking town. There is a road that goes up to the radio towers on top, so we had to try it out. It’s a steep track, much like 
a Canadian logging road. The view from the top was both pretty, looking out over the surrounding hills, and ugly, looking out towards the iron mine, which seems well on the way to consuming Tom Price’s mountain of iron. Tom Price is the highest town in Western Australia, so we were expecting another cold night.