Broome, 6.10.09
Today the world became a better place, a much better place, to start the day off, still in Derby, early in the morning, 6.00am. A man arrives at our friends place next door, the welder to repair Darryl & Sarah’s 4WD, finishing that he takes a look at our cracked sump. Very nicely he recommends the only guy in town who could possibly do it, the man is to busy to help until later today. Well, I’m not having a bar of that, a quick trip to the hardware and $22 later I have a tube of Knead It in my hands, one hour later the $1200 repair job is complete, and working. Oh YEAH BABY! That’s a saving of $1178, bargain of the century; we should go stay in a hotel.

But wait, there’s more. We’re in Broome by 2.00pm, by 4.00pm our tent is set up and by 4.30pm we’re all racing across Cable Beach (absolutely stunning) and diving into the Indian Ocean. The INDIAN OCEAN!! I have to say I have never been more excited to see the Ocean and judging by the grins on everybody else’s faces they haven’t either. After six weeks of crossing the driest country on the planet diving into the Indian Ocean for the first time ever in any of our lives (in my family at least) was like heaven on a stick, or beach I guess.

Cable Beach is beautiful, it would have to be the widest beach I’ve ever seen and the water is postcard aqua, and warm, not hot, warm. It was named as it was originally where they buried the cable for the telegraph line many years ago, now it’s one of the countries holiday Mecca’s, we however have landed here outside peak season and just before the stingers and so it’s almost perfect. We, the Elliott family, spent some time teaching our English friends how to build dribble sandcastles as the sunset, they were all so impressive that Darryl couldn’t stop taking photos and we decided to go back another day to build more and get some high quality photos with the big Canons.
After the beach we had a quick clean up and headed for Roebuck Bay and The Staircase to the Moon. Roebuck Bay is actually Broome’s town beach which sits adjacent to an old pioneer cemetery on the headland, low tide reveals about 10km of sand/mud flats to the other side of the bay, and it faces east. The Staircase to the Moon only occurs when the full moon rising coincides with low tide (speaking of tides the first day we had a low of 1.28m & high of 9.55m, no wonder so much sand gets revealed), then it gets the step shape from the water laying on the sand instead of shimmering on a flat water surface. It’s quite a big deal the whole staircase affair, a little market gets set up in the park by the cemetery, so we ate food there, and good Lord wasn’t that a drama. Lachlan couldn’t choose from any stall, Zali wanted a meat stick and ½ a vego wrap, then after we bought that she wanted the wrap and a samosa so I ate the meat stick which it turned out she did want with the samosa and no wrap, then she didn’t really want the samosa until I wanted it, finally I bought her another Meat stick and she was happy. All this was accompanied by much crying and yelling and I’m sure I lost another handful of hair in the process. Finally we lined up to photograph the moon rise along with a hundred or so other people, somehow we ended up in front of everyone and you can check the photo. What a nice end to the day.