Roebuck Plains to Sand Fire Roadhouse

Sunday 31^st July

Sadly we left Cable Beach and Broome behind, and headed South West towards Port Hedland.  The road appears to follow the coast, but in reality we were anything from 10 to 20 km from it, and couldn’t see it at any stage.

Just as a little aside, you may remember on one of our blogs from Alice Springs, crikey that was two months ago, we had a photo of an old blue Lanz Bulldog tractor towing a homemade caravan.  Well guess what?  Yesterday morning it came chugging along the road past us at the Roebuck Plains Roadhouse.

The countryside seemed even more flat than what we had seen so far, and occasionally, when we weren’t looking at miles and miles of scrub on either side of the road, we would break out into clearer land where you could see for miles across country.  Everything looked the same, and as flat as a pancake for as far as you could see.

Occasionally a dirt road would disappear off into the scrub leading to a station or something. To our right somewhere was the Indian Ocean, and to our left somewhere was the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, but we couldn’t see either.

We decided to stop for the night at Sand Fire Roadhouse and from there explore Eighty Mile Beach which is what the coast was called along this stretch.  Access to Eighty Mile Beach was via an 11 km dirt road that ran out to the coast, about 45 km south of the Road House.  This was the closest we would get to the beach for the entire 600 odd km we would follow it from Broome to Port Hedland.

We pulled into the Road House at about 11.30 and soon got set up in their campground behind the Road House itself.  Over the fence from our caravan was a paddock with a camel, a cow, and a monstrous big bullock.  He was huge, but unfortunately we couldn’t get close enough to him to get a decent photo.  He was without doubt the biggest bullock I have ever seen, and must have stood at least 2 meters at the shoulder. 

There were also heaps of peacocks wandering about the campground, including 2 pure white ones, which I imagine would be very rare.

We were keen to check out the Road house, as Philip had stayed here when he passed through this area about 20 years ago, and had put his Business Card up on their wall along with a thousand others, and had asked us to check if it was still there.

Well, we spent about an hour looking but couldn’t find it.  In fact we couldn’t find any Business Cards at all.  Finally we asked the staff where their wall of Business Cards was.  That’s when we learnt the original Road House had burnt down about 3 years ago, and apparently no one had thought to save Philip’s Card. No wonder we couldn’t find it.  Looks like you’ll have to call back and drop off another one Philip.

After lunch we drove the 45 km south to the turn off to Eighty Mile Beach, and then 11km down the dirt road to the Beach Itself. 

There is a motorcamp right on the beach at the end of the road, and it was jam packed with caravans, tents and camper trailers. Mostly fisherman.  We drove out onto the beach and along it for a couple of kilometres in either direction. 

There was nothing particularly special about it, apart from the fact that the beach was very flat and accordingly there was over a kilometre between the  high and low tide marks.   It was just on low tide when we got there, and we walked out into the water for about 100m and were still less than knee deep.  It was very much a poor man’s version of Cable Beach.

We decided that tomorrow we would move on down the coast for about 140 km, to the Pardoo Roadhouse, where there was another access to the beach at Cape Keraudren.