Here we are at Tom Price. The van park is a few kilometres out of town in the shadow of Mt Nameless.

Plenty of people here but the sites are big and we have been super lucky to get a nice quiet spot adjacent to the men’s end of the facilities. The laundry is next door too, so Homealone was quite satisfied.

Unfortunately, a van came in a bit later and blocked our view of the passage of people in various states of urgency to and fro from those places. Seriously, the location was pretty good and we didn’t get disturbed at all, wind going the right way too perhaps!

The park was our base for seeing the western parts of Karijini. But first we booked a tour of Rio Tinto’s mine. The reason why the town was set up in the mid 1960s.

Went all around the site looking at the various stages of the mining and benefaction processes. Everything is big, including the hole in the ground.

The mine has been going for 60 odd years and our guide said plans were afoot to open a new mine area on the mountain that would see it going for many more to come.

Tom Price is the highest town in WA, 747m above sea level. This is why we found it distinctly chilly at 3 am in the morning.

Following the morning mine tour we headed off for Hamersley Gorge, this is a remote site some 70km from Tom Price, on the north western side of the park.

So it is a longish drive, albeit all sealed roads, to get there and back to see another gorge. Or as Homealone might say ABG. She is a little tired of gorges, doesn’t really like them anyway, having to get close to the edge and looking way down to the bottom. So she doesn’t do it at all. And for going on a dirt road to do it then ‘why’ is the question.

By the way ABG stands for ‘Another Bloody Gorge’ much like ABC stands for ‘Another Bloody Castle’ when you are touring around the UK or Europe.

It is not a difficult descent into Hamersley Waterfall and Gorge. There are some amazing rock strata in the cliff walls and the gorge water hole is very picturesque. Well worth the drive there and back.

Our last day at Tom Price took us back to central Karijini for a look at some gorges there. Here are a few pics of the scenery at Joffre Gorge, Knox Gorge and the Oxer Lookout.

No long walks to do here, only short strolls to the lookout points. There are numerous longer walks down into these gorges, described as being difficult and also time consuming. Allthego passed on these, leaving them to the more nimble!

It was time to return to the coast and we headed north west the next morning to Karratha.