Lap Around Australia: Tom Price

Tom Price

Tom Price sounds like a funny name for a town. It's a purpose built mining town in the Pilbara established by Rio Tinto to support its mining operations in the area. It is named after Thomas Moore Price, VP of the US company Kaiser Steel, who was instrumental in convincing the WA Government of the abundance of iron ore in the state and to lift their embargo on foreign exports. We're here as it's close to Karajini National Park and we needed somewhere to wash, re-supply our groceries, fuel and gas. Oh, and have a rest!

The Tom Price Tourist Park is about 4 km out of town on the road to Mt Nameless. We were delighted to find that it's a very nice park with flat grassy, easy to get into sites, good clean amenities and abundant (and very, very noisy) birdlife. The company here has been very congenial too, and we've made some new friends, Brian and Pam, who we shared a few sundowners with, and Cherie and Chris who are camped on the other side of us. Cherie cut our hair for a small fee. Yay! She's an ex hairdresser and advertises cheap haircuts on her van.

The town has a good Coles and a rather nice coffee shop. It's a very clean and green town considering we are in the middle of a very dirty dusty mining area. It has a swimming pool which only opens once the temperature is over 35 degrees! It also boasts an open air cinema (not on while we're here though sadly) and John is about to avail himself of the Homebase store too .... we are happy.

Yesterday we went on one of the Lestok Mine Tours. It was $35/person for an hour and a half bus tour, and it turned out to be really interesting and informative. Barb thinks she may be morphing into her parents as it's just the sort of thing they would've greatly enjoyed doing on their many travels.
We had to all meet at the Visitor Centre in town and pick up our hard hats and protective eyewear before we could board the bus.

 Our driver and tour guide for the day was a man who actually drives the big trucks in the mines as his normal job, on a six days on six off rotation. There are also a lot of FIFO workers in town. He drove us right into the mine site and to a viewing platform where we could get out of the bus and take photos. The rest of the tour we saw everything from the inside of the bus.

Tom Price mine has very high grade deposits of iron ore. It sends the ore via train to Dampier and Cape Lambert for distribution by ship to China, Japan and other Asian countries. Five trains per day leave Tom Price laden with 28000 tons of ore each. Each train is 2.5 Km long and is pulled by three locomotives. Jeez.

We witnessed the very large deep pit that used to be a mountain but has now been cleaved down the middle by the mining operations. The trucks run 24 hours per day. They are massive! The tyres alone are huge and cost more than $40000 each. The ore is processed into "fines" from "lumps" on-site and ore from another nearby mine is also processed here, being delivered to the site by a 24 kilometre long conveyor belt. Apparently the conveyor belt cost a billion dollars to build and that was deemed cheaper than building another processing plant at that mine. Wow! The mind boggles at those figures.

It was a boy's dream to see all the diggers and trucks doing their thing. Even Barb couldn't help be impressed. We were hot and dusty by the time we returned, but a visit to the coffee shop restored us to rights. The coffee shop struck John as a bit twee, but the coffee was unusually good - strong without being bitter and served up by a very chatty NZ waitress. She's here because mum, sister and auntie are here already and told her how wonderful the place is and she had to come over to join them!

 

Today we thought we would climb nearby Mt Nameless. Well it's right there .... looming over our caravan park, so it seemed like a good idea. There is a road that you can drive up instead, but it sounded VERY scary! It has to be done in low range 4WD and is very steep with a lot of loose gravel and steep drop offs. NOT Barb's idea of good fun.

Instead we drove to the start of the walking trail. There were another young couple of locals with their dogs doing the walk ahead of us. They seemed dubious as to whether we'd be up to it. Turns out they were right to be concerned! We got about half way up and decided that it was getting too scary and dangerous to continue, especially as there's not much in the way of handrails and there's a lot of loose rock and sheer edges. We did feel quite proud to get as far as we did. and we did get some magnificent views from up high, just not a 360 degree view from the peak. We'd rather be alive and uninjured .... so we came back down slowly and carefully. We then revisited the aforementioned café and found that not only was the coffee as good as yesterday, but they do really good sausage rolls as well.  John wants to stay an extra day to test the citrus tarts but Barb got very strict and said NO.  Hrrmph.

The Major Mitchell galahs and Corellas that live in this park are very tame and friendly. They come right up to you and can be hand fed. We saw the corellas having a lovely splash in the sprinklers - their white feathers get quite dusty and they look a bit rusty coloured rather than white.
We've enjoyed our relaxed stay here at Tom Price.