There are two Gladstones?

Leaving Carnarvon in our wake (some would say that this is the best thing that you can do to Carnarvon) we set a steady pace of 86KPH. The car's cruise control only works in 2 KPH increments, so 85 KPH wasn't an option. We had a pretty ferocious headwind and going any faster would a pure waste of fuel. Gladstone (Western Australia) was just three hours to the south of us and we had plenty of time to get there.

The North West Coastal Highway leading south is a fine piece of road, although just a bit boring. It is another of those trips where, for many kilometres, most of Australia looks like the rest of Australia. Worse still, we had covered this particular piece of road countless times as a couple and even more times by me as a solo traveller back in the days when I worked up and down the Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline. There would be no surprises on this leg of the journey.

Oddly, although I had travelled this stretch of highway so many times, I had never taken the time or trouble to drive the six kilometres into Gladstone, even though the turnoff is well signposted. Six kilometres is all that it may be, but when we turned off the nice, smooth, bitumen road onto the rusty, red, gravel road it was clear that it was going to take a while to do the distance - the road was extremely corrugated!

This was one of those times where I had to weigh up the benefit of letting the tyres down against the fact that we didn't have far to go and that it would take about an hour to re- inflate the tyres again when we came back out. Even more frustrating was that we only intended staying the one night and letting the tyres down for such a short run into a place for such a short stay didn't seem worthwhile. We didn't.....we should have.....

This is perhaps the only road/track I have ever been on where there was no respite from the corrugations anywhere. Every millimetre of the six kilometres was corrugated, badly. We took well over half an hour to get to Gladstone from the highway. On arrival,, the first thing that you notice is how flat the area is. The campsites are distributed along a stretch of shore front tracks, some with views of Shark Bay, others have their view obscured by saltbush, and all not more than 500mm above the high water mark.

There is a single toilet block comprising of two flushing toilets (that were solar powered and stopped flushing after dark - if they were battery powered, then the battery was clearly knackered.) Next to the toilet block is a dump point for those, like us, whom are self-contained that way.

On the other side of the main entry track from where the toilets are located is the caravan belonging to the "caretaker", a rotunda and the remains of the old Gladstone Jetty (which was used to send out the wool clip from nearby sheep Stations.) There is a rock groin that goes out to the start of the jetty but the wooden jetty itself is in a state of complete disrepair and has been secured to prevent access.

Gladstone: The Rotunda, the beach, the rock groin and what's left of the jetty

While we were travelling to Gladstone the screaming breeze had ebbed away to almost nothing and the sheltered waters of the eastern side of Shark Bay had barely a ripple on them. It was easy to tell from the slope of the sandy/muddy beaches that the water was very shallow and that one would have to go out a long way to get into any reasonable depth. The water was not clear, but not too silted either, considering the make-up of the beaches.

The tide is about halfway in. That is the Caretaker's dinghy. He leaves it there with all of his fishing gear in it.

We wandered over to the rotunda and were immediately beset upon by the "caretaker". This guy was a picture! He was rakish in build, save for the beer-gut from Hell, about 5' 6'' tall, clearly hadn't seen a razor in a very long while, had the hugest "grog nose" that I had ever seen, was as brown as a berry from prolonged exposure to the elements, had a can of grog in one hand and smelled as though he'd been on the grog for several days.

He pointed over to his caravan, which was an old Windsor or similar, about 22' in length and sagging down at both ends, was surrounded by all manner of junk and rubbish, had a little generator screaming its lungs out and had no shelter such as an awning or annex. "I'm the Caretaker" he pronounced, before adding "but not at the moment. I only work during the tourist season. The rest of the time I just live here." He then proceeded to give us the full "caretaker spiel" as though he was, in fact, on duty.

By the time our new friend had finished talking we knew everything we needed to know about the place (except that the dunnies would stop working after dark), including where the only place was that I would be likely to catch fish. He later went out to that spot in his dinghy, bobbed around for a couple of hours and then came back empty handed, so I'm glad I didn't go to the trouble of taking the kayak off the roof and going fishing.

We walked back to the vehicle and van and parked at the original site that we had thought might be OK. It wasn't long before the awning was rolled out and the bar was open. We had a lovely, peaceful, evening watching the Sun set as the tide marched in and a thunderstorm rolled overhead, dropping a few minutes of welcome rain on us. I was almost tempted to stay another day but Sue wasn't keen and we resolved to move on the next morning.

The thunderstorm was brewing, making for an excellent sunset to view while enjoying a couple of bevvies

As a short-stay or overnighter, Gladstone is worth considering. It is fairly basic, but it is cheap at $6.00 per head per night. I wouldn't recommend swimming there, unless at high tide, when the water does come up over the sandier part of the beach. We watched people launch boats there (in fact we witnessed something that neither of us had ever seen before - a car jump-starting a boat) and netting is allowed at one section of the beach. The road in and out is definitely an issue and, once again, is in the Shire of Carnarvon, so it probably only gets a cursory scrape over with a grader once in a blue moon, just like the road from the Blowholes to Gnaraloo.

You don't see this every day. A boat being jump-started by a car!

The rain that we got had completely dried by the morning, which is just as well because signs in the area clearly indicate that if the road is wet it's closed, and, if it's closed it is an offence to drive on it. The penalties are $400.00 per wheel of your car or rig that is on the road. (That would be $3200.00 if we were to drive over a closed road with the van hooked up!) Never ignore road closed signs in WA.

We set off early, knowing that we had a slow haul ahead of us, getting over the same corrugations that thumped the bejesus out of us the previous day. Never before did the North West Coastal Highway look so good. We turned south, our destination being Geraldton, where we would stay at our Son's place for a while and do some work on the van. We had discussed the interior windows in the van which, quite frankly, had pee'd us off from the day that we took delivery of her, and had decided that they had to go. this would be one of the projects to get done during our stay, but we'll leave that for the next issue.....