Day 40 Millstream-Chichester National Park & Dampier

OK, so we’re a bit slow but we finally worked out the sea turtle egg-laying schedule. We climbed back out of bed at 3:30am, coaxed the boys out and into the car, before heading back to Cemetery Beach, torches in hand. As we walked onto the beach, dodging the crabs in the darkness, we walked along the waters edge until we were intercepted by a young man wearing orange overalls and a very serious face. He explained that he was part of team tagging Flatback Sea Turtles. They had also received funding from BHP to attach satellite tracking devices to a lucky few and if we could behave ourselves and follow instructions, they’d let us hang around and watch them.
We discovered that they had a team of 4 people based in port Hedland and two others had come over from Townsville, to help with the attachment of the tracking units. We turned off our torches and snuck up behind a nesting turtle and watched as she dug a deep hole in the sand with her rear flippers and when the hole was as deep as she could get it, we watched as she dropped about 60 small white eggs into the hole and began covering the clutch with sand. As she began heading back down the sand towards the waves, the research team grabbed her, sat her on two recycling boxes, and proceeded to attach a tag to her front flipper and they then strapped a transmitter to her back. This particular turtle will be live on the internet in about a week and we can track her movements by looking at www.seaturtle.org . This experience sits right up at the top of the highlights list, for us all. I’m certain that for Jacqui and I, this will be an once-in-a-lifetime experience. After returning to the van for breakfast, we pulled the camper down and by 9:30, we’d left Port Hedland pretty happy with ourselves.
Our next planned stop was to be Millstream-Chichester National Park and as we headed down the highway, we were all quite shocked by how dry the landscape becomes when you move just a few kilometres from the coast. Some areas are so dry, I’m sure I heard the trees whistling for dogs. After a quick stop off at Roebourne and then a back-track of 27km, we turned off the highway into Millstream-Chichester National Park at about midday. During the next 90 minutes of dirt track driving, the unique landscape reminded us of giant upturned Marble Cakes, with very distinct areas of Spinifex creeping into the dark brown stones of what must have been ancient volcanos.
We finally stumbled upon the oasis we’d been looking for. The Python Pool is a tiny exposed corner of an underground lake covering about 2,000 square kilometres and containing millions of cubic meters of fresh, clean water. The temperature had climbed into the mid 40’s so as soon as we saw this beautiful billabong, we all spontaneously shed our clothes and fell into this desert oasis. Unfortunately, the signs advising us “No Camping Allowed” indicated the regular presence of rangers so after a couple of hours, we began the last 100km of today’s journey towards Dampier. We finished what had turned out to be a great day with a seafood platter at the Dampier Yacht Club watching the sun set over the bay. During dinner, we all agreed that our days since leaving Broom had been a little tiring so we’ve decided to stay an extra day to re-charge the batteries, before tackling the Coral Coast of WA.
Cheers,
Jorg