Cleaverville you ask, where is that? It is 26 kms north of Karratha. We travelled north today to Karratha, as we did not want to miss some excellent places in this area. Cleaverville is a free beach camp – as of October (you have to like our timing). We can only camp here 3 days but from April to September you can camp for up to 3 months at $160 a month – bargain rates. We will use this as our base to visit the historic abandoned town of Cossack and also Pt Sampson. We want to visit – Roebourne, Wickham as well as Karratha & Dampier. Tonight we are camped overlooking the beach with great night views of Dampier and Pt Sampson.
Cleaverville Beach is right on the “W” of Wickham.
This is a photo of our mud map screen during our trip today.
We packed up early as it has been quite hot a Millstream. A week on, I am still suffering from my trip up at Karijini. Time to own up - I have also – choice (A) fractured a rib choice (B) pulled or torn something in the area. Needless to say, I am totally useless at helping Glen with packing up, scream when we go round corners and can’t bend down or twist. The long and short of it is that what ever happened will take more than a few days to heal. I think that I have fractured a rib which hit the step I left when I rolled my ankle.
We had the most enjoyable scenic drive from Millstream to Karratha – 130 kms. This scenery is just for the engine drivers and the ore wagons. It would give the Ghan a run for it’s money. It is far better than the train journey that we took in New Zealand from Dunedin with similar scenery.
The road winds through the hills and gorges with spinifex plains and exposed red rock. The road edges were in full bloom with wildflowers in cream and purples and every now and again Sturt’s Desert Pea.
Our first port of call was to the Tourist Information Centre and we were happy to see that they had water there, so we refilled the camper plus the water bladder in the car. It was $2 for the 100 litres of water – which was great not to have to go looking for a tap somewhere. The girl there was very helpful and gave us all the information we were looking for. We were worried about getting a camp at Cleaverville because it is the school holidays here. The locals leave town and go to Broome or Exmouth, so that’s good. We picked up our mail from home, got some fresh bread and headed to Cleaverville.
One of the few camps available was at the top of a sand dune with a bend in the track up. This just makes keeping the speed up a little more harder. Note, we have just filled up and added at least another 100 kgs to the load up a very sandy and soft track. Glen got us up 90% of the way, but we could not get the Nissan to pull that extra 10 feet.
Glen had to deal with it all, I was unable to help, barely able to even get out of the car. At this stage, I was ready to back it down and camp any where. He stuck to it, dig, max trax, move forward two feet, dig, max trax, more forward two feet.
We are now happily camped on top of the sand dune with 5 star ocean views and also of Dampier and Pt Sampson. All the effort was worth it as the difficult location gives us good camp security, so we won’t need to be worried leaving the camp site to tour the other locations.
The sunset and night view tonight was absolutely beautiful. We have a sandy beach in front of us and rock pools further along. Some of the camps are in front of mangroves. Looking forward to a swim tomorrow and at low tide a snorkel or look at the rock pools.
So glad you've made it to Cleaverville - we thought it was very different to anywhere else! Your photos are great - my camera has been picked up by Sony for repair - very pleased with them, they sent a courier to pick and keep me up to date with text messages as well as emails! We are relying on Rick's old Nokia phone (Marc's old one) for photos for the time being.
ReplyDeletethanks Bev. We are enjoying our stay here. I bet you are constantly seeing great shots and can't do anything about it.
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