Marble Bar

  21/07/2011
   We have may have given the impression that we were keen to leave Port Hedland, well, we were that keen we have travelled 250K’s outback to the small town of Marble Bar. We haven’t come just to get away from Port Headland, we have done some research and we had decided we were coming anyway. On the way over we saw our first feral camels. We always knew they were here,  they were released to the wild when they  ceased to be needed as beasts of burden years ago and they have adapted well to the conditions. We are very close ,of course to The Great Sandy Desert.
  Marble Bar has 1 or 2 claims to fame firstly it being an old mining town where early pioneers thought they had discovered Marble, when in fact it was an enormous bar of Jasper. There is gold here, but Marble bars’ major claim is that it is entered in the Guinness book of records as having the most consistently high temperatures . The record apparently is 160 days of consecutive temperatures above 38.7C  and that’s hot. It’s quite warm right now, so we have cooled off with a beer in the pub.  The Ironclad Hotel. This is literally a corrugated Iron building. You could say “ice cold in Ironclad.”

  22/07/2011

  What a fascinating place Marble Bar is, very laid back, almost in a 1950s timewarp. The sign out side one of the 2 shops says “ If the ute’s (pickup) on the drive, I’m open” The barmaid in the Ironclad Pub asked us last night “ is that in England”, when we told her we were from the U K . In her defence she was American! The post comes on Mon, Wed and Friday, newspapers come everyday……..yesterdays. Surprisingly we can get a signal on the shiny thing, but no signal on our mobiles. 

  We drove out to look at the famous Marble Bar, just a few K’s out of town, a mass of beautiful coloured stone, that is actually a form of quartz but certainly looks like marble. After scrambling about over the rocks there is a wonderful deep, cool water hole to swim in, just keeps an eye out for snakes! A few more Ks up a rough track is the now unused Comet Goldmine and Museum. The Museum, a rough old shed, has all manner of minerals on display amongst mining equipment and the like. Spent an absorbing hour  and came out with 2 postcards, a fridge magnet and an imitation steel stubby holder! Unfortunately the mine is too dangerous to go into but there are moves to reopen it, to mine iron ore (as if they haven’t got enough of it round here!)

 On to the flying fox lookout where a steel wire rope is stretched out across the Coongon River Gorge. From this rope there are, suspended, flow meters which measure the amount of water that rushes though the channel during the wet season, far too technical, but the water level does rise by nearly 7 metres. 

  More about Marble Bar tomorrow, we are off to the pub. Happy Hour!