2006/07 Australia trip - Snake Creek, Chichester |
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Thursday July 20th
It wasn’t as cold as expected, and we had a warm sunny morning. Finding that the town’s water was good, surprising for an iron mining area, we filled up all our tanks and containers and headed out for the Railway Road. Finding it was harder than we’d expected and we went through some heroic and totally unnecessary 4-wheel drive ups and downs before we found the road and its warning signs. The road turned out to be a well maintained gravel road and no problem at all for our camper. Perhaps it’s more troublesome in the wet season.
As it’s a service road, it follows the railroad tracks and we had company from a fully-loaded ore train heading for the coast. Each freight car has to be tens of tons, and there are hundreds of cars, so each of these trains weighs thousands of tons, causing the ground to shake.
We found that the railroad operations seemed to result in freshly turned areas of earth which were now ablaze with wildflowers. Some we were familiar with like the mulla mullas, but now we were also seeing the brilliant red and black Sturts Pea, a large complicated red flower, with black Bart Simpson eyeballs, that grows profusely on vines.
We were obviously driving the road at the right time of the year.
Another driver had recommended a drive up a nearby mountain to the radio masts. We climbed this track with everything falling over inside the camper because it was so steep. The view was amazing: great red mountains covered with a thin yellow-green layer of spinifex, but so thin that the red rock still 
shone through. We saw a train of empty wagons making its way back to Tom Price, an impossibly long train. The 
red gash to the left of the train is the Railway Road.
As we neared the end of the Railway Road, we were seeing flocks of budgerigars, little green torpedoes that we couldn’t catch with the camera. Sandie also spotted a pair of Australian bustards, large birds rather like overweight geese. This pair just ambled off into the distance, without bothering to fly. We were heading for the Snake Creek campground, a nice name we thought. On the way there we passed two groups struggling to change tyres, so perhaps the road was more difficult than it looked.
The last few miles of scenery into the campground just dazzled us: weirdly eroded rocks, blazing red cliffs offset by the green of spinifex and shrubs, and a constant supply of wildflowers on both sides. We came to an agreement: no more stops for taking pictures of scenery or flowers or we’d never get there. We arrived shortly before sunset at Snake Creek, a tiny campground with just a handful of other campers. A short walk up the creek bed at sunset confirmed that the snakes were away on vacation somewhere else.