Broome......

Mmmm, Broome.

In the 22 years since I was here last it has quadrupled in size and become less frontier and more Noosa of the North! But still a great place to spend some time. By the time we got to Broome we’d been on the road for 7 weeks and all were a bit rough around the edges. So we stayed a week and did every tourist thing we could find! It wasn’t hard to stay as our trailer front door opened straight onto town beach. Hanging around was an easy thing to do.

Broome was a pearling town with all the wildness, good and bad of human character in the past. Now there’s little of that remaining but you can see glimpses of the past in Chinatown and in the unique building architecture that all the new buildings have used as a blueprint. The touristic things all mainly revolve around pearling so we did them all. Willie Creek Pearl farm was great. The kids seemed to really enjoy it and got to cut a keshi pearl out of a real oyster. Each pearl oyster has a soft pea crab that lives inside it and does its housekeeping for it. That was as interesting to me as the pearl! Lochie was very excited when he got to hold a $100 000.00 pearl necklace, definitely a champagne taste kind of boy!

Part of the pearl farm was a boat trip out on Willie creek, a tidal flow of 10m each tide change made for an interesting trip. The most exciting thing though was seeing a very grumpy stone fish swimming along one of the tidal inlets! Who’s ever seen a stone fish swim?

The pearl luggers tour really defined Broome’s pearling history and was surprising in its information. The kids were deeply fascinated as to how the divers went to the toilet when they were in those huge dry diving suits for 10-12 hours a day. The bottle on a string demonstration was talked about by Will for days! The dry suits and hard hat diving didn’t end in Broome until the mid seventies when some abalone divers from Victoria challenged the best Japanese divers and Lugger Captain to a one week show down. The scuba boys won by several thousand shells! This was the end of the Japanese community in Broome as they all packed up and went home.

We did the famous camel ride along Cable beach one afternoon with Alison who’s been plugging the beach for 27 years with her camels.That's us above, the first five on the camels! I think we all enjoyed it and were glad to do the 30 minute ride rather than the 1 hour back buster! The kids were much entertained by the thought they might fall down a camel’s neck like I did as a child. It may be a really touristic thing to do but as the sun is low in the sky and the sand and water stretch away from you in either direction, it’s pretty cool.

The Malcolm Douglas Crocodile farm reminded Craig and I of watching his TV show as teenagers. The kids got to hold baby croc’s but I think the thing they loved the most was not the crocodiles but 2 corellas that talked to them and would whistle and jump up and down on command.

We were lucky enough to find the dinosaur footprints at Cape Gantheume. Every divet in the rocks was starting to look like T. Rex until we found some unmistakable enormous prints! We watched a couple of beautiful sunsets there. The colour of the red sand stone, blue sky and orange sun going down with the clouds lit up pink was gorgeous.

Food restocked, car serviced and trailer repaired for all the things we bounced off it in Karijini we headed off up the Dampier peninsula for a few days.