40 Mile Beach & Bullara Station Stay

We moved on from Cleaverville Beach, not far up the road to 40 Mile Beach, another campsite run by the Karratha shire. It was the same as Cleaverville in terms of cost $10 a night with no facilities. It was also right on the beach, but a lot of its sites were behind the mangroves. We paid the caretaker & followed the track along checking out the sites. It was much busier here with a lot of long term campers. We weren't to keen to camp on top of the mangroves, as the midgees were keen, so we followed the track along, all the way to the end & ended up at the very last campsite 33 on the beach. It was tucked into the dunes, but you could still see the water. It was pretty private, except for a road down to the beach itself running nearby, but we only saw a few cars a day. We set up & Mat went to find some fire wood, he came back with some of the heaviest, hardest wood we have seen for our whole trip, it definitely gave the chainsaw a work out, but burned really well, making awesome coals. 

40 Mile Beach above & below

The next day we went for a drive to explore. You can get a fair way down towards a creek inlet, we had a fish, but not luck & also a swim. We then made our way back towards the caretakers camp &  found a pretty good beach up that end as well. Back to camp for some lunch, we then rang our dads for Father's Day & cooked up a delicious roast chicken & veggies for dinner, we had to take advantage of that beautiful wood. 

Creek at 40 Mile beach

40 Mile Beach campsite

2 nights was enough for us at 40 Mile Beach. It was another good spot, but we did prefer Cleaverville beach. 

The next morning we packed up & headed off. We had a fair day ahead of us. We decided to not go to Onslow, so bypassed that & headed towards Exmouth. We decided to stay at a station stay for one night before going into Cape Range National Park. We needed to do some washing & badly needed a decent shower. So we stayed at Bullara. They had pretty good facilities, & we got the washing done & long showers in. By about 4pm the wind really started to pick up & it got really cold. We weren't used to that after the Kimberley!! We were supposed to have fish & salad for dinner, but that was less than appetising on a cold night, so we had a tin of soup & bread followed by a coffee & fruit cake & snuck off to bed at about 7pm with our teeth chattering. We even had a few spits of rain during the night, our first rain in, we can't even remember how long. The cost was $14 per person per night at Bullara. Definitely an authentic station stay, it even had a hot water donkey.

Bullara campsite

We were up early the next day, for another blissful hot shower & then headed towards Exmouth & Cape Range National Park. We were very excited to see the Ningaloo reef.