Monday, 8 June 2026
On the road again this morning. We pulled out of the Discovery Park at Karratha about 9.30am. With another fairly easy travelling day today, we didn’t need to head off too early. We drove back out to the highway and turned right to continue south.
Not far out of Karratha, we passed a plant with a flame burning atop a tower. Which begged the question – Why do gas processing plants produce a flame? Google told us that the flame is known as a flare and it is primarily a critical safety mechanism to quickly burn off excess gas. This prevents dangerous pressure buildups and equipment ruptures during emergencies, routine maintenance, or unexpected plant malfunctions. So now we know!
Just after the turnoff to Pannawonica, beside the Robe River, we stopped at the Robe River Rest Area to use the conveniences. This is a 24-hour rest area and maybe quite a few people made use of it over the weekend? No toilet paper in the loos, so I grabbed some tissues from the glove box. The drop toilets didn’t smell BUT they were full of paper, making them about the worst toilets we have encountered for the whole trip. Most facilities have been surprisingly clean and well stocked. As we pulled back onto the highway I was busy Googling the WA Roads Department. I discovered it is actually Main Roads Western Australia. On their website I found a Contact Us page that enabled me to report that the toilets at the Robe River Rest Area needed emptying. My community service for the day.
About 80 kilometres later, we turned onto the Onslow Road. Just past the intersection we spied the WA Limestone Quarry. It was a slow morning on the road, so that led me to wondering about the difference between a quarry and a mine? The answer – although both extract raw materials from the Earth, mining generally targets valuable minerals and metals hidden deep underground, whereas quarrying specifically extracts construction materials like stone, sand and gravel from open-pit excavations at the surface.
The industrial theme along the Pilbara Coast continued with us passing a Waste Transfer Station, the access roads to a couple of mines and then the turn off to the Port of Ashburton. Driving straight on to Onslow, we crossed more salt crystallizing ponds and the Onslow Airport, before passing the salt piles for Onslow Salt on the outskirts of town.
It was only just lunchtime, so we suspected that it was too early to check-in at the Onslow Beach Resort, but we thought we’d ask at Reception anyway. Yup, too early, our room was not available. We headed off to the Onslow General Store where we purchased some salad rolls for lunch. With food and beverages sourced, we drove to Sunset Beach where we found some picnic tables to eat our surprisingly good salad rolls. If they had just had beetroot on them, they would have been perfect. Sunset Beach has a romantic sort of ring to it and sounds like a lovely place to go to watch the sun set. However, that’s only if you want an ‘industrial’ sort of sunset, because the Onslow Salt loading jetty juts out into the ocean from Sunset Beach.
Sunset Beach is also situated at one end of the Ian Blair Memorial Boardwalk. Needing to fill in some time, we decided to walk the boardwalk to … Sunrise Beach. The boardwalk is a fitting tribute to Ian Donald Blair’s valuable contribution to the town of Onslow from 1959 until his death in 1998. The boardwalk is dotted with interpretative boards covering Onslow’s flora and fauna, atomic testing on the Montebello Islands 100km off the Pilbara Coast, WWII, the town’s relocation following the shift in the Ashburton River’s course, the Traditional owners – the Thalanyji people, the pastoralists, the fishing (prawns), pearling and salt industries, the 1890s gold rush and the discovery of oil and gas on the North West Shelf.
The fabulous boardwalk – what I liked best was that it was (hopefully) above where any mulga snakes could be lurking? – delivered us to the ANZAC Memorial Park at Sunrise Beach. This park is pristine and even more work is being done at the moment to improve the foreshore area. Onslow is definitely one of the most attractive towns we have visited on the coast so far. We checked out the memorial arch and Bernie used his photography apps, to estimate where the sun will rise tomorrow morning.
Still waiting on word of our room being ready, we re-traced our steps to the truck where we had left it at Sunset Beach. The timing worked out very well, with the phone call from the resort coming in soon after we had returned to the truck. We motored back to the Onslow Beach Resort where we completed our check-in. OMG, we had to do two circuits to find our room. We have been put in the naughty corner with our room hidden down a narrow walkway squeezed between two wings of rooms. Once we found it we could transfer our gear from the truck, including Splices from our freezer for Splice o’clock!
About 4.30pm we headed out to the Termite Mound viewing area 10 Ks out of town. During the planning phase, we noticed this Point of Interest in our atlas, so thought we might as well include a night in Onslow to see the termite mounds. Ahem, little did we know just how many termite mounds we would have seen throughout the Northern Territory and the Kimberley by the time we reached Onslow!! The mounds are supposed to be best viewed during the Golden Hour but, wouldn’t you know it, today was the cloudiest day we’ve had in weeks. We drove out anyway and took photographs of the termite’s homes built with mud and saliva.
We headed back into town and returned to Sunset Beach, not really expecting much with all the cloud about. The cloud actually produced some interesting effects and, with the salt loading jetty silhouetted in the foreground, created some sunset images different from ones we have taken previously.
As we drove back to the resort, via Second Avenue, the lighting on the street art and the trees in the median strip was just starting to pop. We stopped to take photos of the illuminated dolphin (fish?) statue in the roundabout near the Beadon Bay Hotel and the floral sculpture at Third Street. Very pretty, BUT Google is not helping me out at all with any information about the artists or what the sculptures represent.
Tomorrow we are meeting our Perth friends in Exmouth and then travelling back down the coast to Perth with them. We’ll have to see how we go finding the balance between socialising in the evenings and blogging??!
Steps: 10,300 (6.75kms)
