​Salt of the earth! - iron ore and salt 2 8-29 July 2017

This little 'fire box' has been terrific! We've added a small camp oven so we're home and hosed in the food and warmth department. It's all lots of fun!

We passed odd looking hills on our trip to Port Hedland. These looked like they had red crew cuts. All that iron ore poking out ..... but wait till you see further south into the Pilbara!

With Broome done and dusted, we headed south for the Pilbara with a delightful overnight roadside stop. We nestled in among wattle bushes, lit a campfire and Lindsay cooked his first damper for breakfast the next morning. Good one Lindsay!

Wow! Imagine the acidity of the ocean if that lot got washed out to sea. It doesn't beat thinking about. The piles and the evaporation ponds fairly glisten as you approach. An awesome sight!

The horizon as we drove into Port Hedland was dominated by towering mountains of glistening salt. We'd arrived at the largest solar salt works in Australia, the 2nd biggest in the world (I think Dampier is the biggest exporter of solar salt in the world - but who's counting). My head has been chocked so full of statistics that I simply can't remember them - did I hear a big sigh of relief? But in case you're interested the salt is exported for industrial use and much of that for the plastics industry where it is used to turn stuff into other stuff!

No this tree doesn't have red trunk and branches. Like everything in Port Hedland, everything has a coating of rich red iron ore dust.

Port Hedland is a ginormous port with over a dozen loading docks which operate 24/7 shipping out 100s of millions of tons of iron ore each year - staggering! What goes into all the holes they are digging in our Australia? We might get swallowed up by the sea and that's before global warming raises the sea level much further. But ....

These little tugs do an amazing job zipping in and out parking and deparking! Massive ships. I mean we're talking about 9 hold ships which carrying up to 200,000 tons of our good earth!

Check out the size difference between tugs and ship. They manage however to manoeuvre these monsters into just the right place seemingly effortlessly. Fascinating to watch.

I took this pic to show you a very clever way of berthing the ships. See those yellow square things? They're giant magnets. The tugs push the ship close to the wharf and these magnet get turned on and suck the ship alongside. Clever eh!?

The port is like something out of a sci-fi movie with gigantic machinery, mostly unmanned, feeding the ships' gaping bowels below. Something like ever second enough iron ore is loaded to make a car!

We jumped on a fantastic harbour tour operated by the Seafarers Centre. Every day they take a large launch around all the ships in port to collect seamen wanting to go ashore. They provide a wonderful service which includes sorting out legal and medical issues, advocacy and more. The tour included lots of background and then we headed out on the water. We collected seamen from 3 ships and got to talk with some of them. Very interesting!

This was a Chinese ship. You can see a few seaman starting down the gangway ready to board the Seafarers launch we were on. Jolly big ship eh!? It's waiting to be loaded. When filled they settle down into the water up to the black part of their hulls. Remember Archimedes and the bathtub?

This ship was manned by Russian and Ukrainian seamen. I got to talk to one of them. It was his birthday and he was off to buy champagne to celebrate. The ship was a dry ship so I imagine there'd be lots of celebrating and sore heads before they got back on board.

With that intro to the Pilbara, it was time to really get into it so we headed south for Karratha and Dampier.