We have had an interesting day out at Marble Bar.

Homealone though was a little sceptical that the 400km round trip for a hamburger at the old pub and seeing a bit of jasper was worth the journey.

We did leave a little late and just managed to get to the town half an hour or so before the Ironclad Hotel shut at 2pm.

Allthego thought the burger was rather good, particularly in the ambience of the beer garden out the back. The iconic pub was established in 1892, one of the towns first permanent structures. Inside it doesn’t seem a lot has changed.

The town of Marble Bar has been around a long time. It was settled well before Dampier, Port Headland and other places up this way were established. It was gold finds in the late 1880s that originally brought Europeans to the region.

The town was called Marble Bar because the new arrivals thought a geological feature passing across a river bed was marble. In fact it was jasper an altogether different type of rock, but the town name stuck.

Tourists come here to check out the jasper field. This is a post card pic of the sight. Very colourful. Allthego is a bit puzzled by the pic and thinks it might be doctored a bit. He believes the colours don’t really show up like this unless the rock is wet. Could be wrong. Maybe a photographer was here just after rain. The location of the jasper had been recently cut off from the main track by floods that have removed a lot of sand between the rocks.

A bit of a maze to get through, and unfortunately we didn’t have the time to get to the postcard spot. Found a few slabs of it though and got a couple of pics, the water bottle came in handy to get the colours showing well.

Marble Bar’s main claim to fame is that it is recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as ‘the hottest town in Australia’. For the 161 days leading up to 20 April 1924 the temperature did not drop below 37.8’C. That is a hundred year old record. The town continues to get regular mentions in TV weather reports for extreme temperatures.

We had a bit of time to look around the town at some of the historical buildings before setting tracks back to Port Hedland into the setting sun.

We left Port Hedland in the morning for some time at Karijini NP, inland and away to the south east.