Broome (& 80 Mile Beach) 21/8/08

Broome Car Kilometres: 172,387

Distance Travelled: 779km

Total Distance Travelled: 4136km

The next stop was due to be Broome but after one 770km run up to Port Hedland we decide to break up the journey and stop at a camp site on 80 Mile Beach. I am not sure if 80 Mile Beach is actually 80 miles long. These Aussies aren't exactly accurate in place names like this. (I could see both ends of the '10 mile creek' we drove over on the way in) but I can definitely confirm that it is a very long beach.

We arrived at about 2 in the afternoon and were directed to an end pitch at the furthest end of the campsite. Normally I would have assumed that, as we were both part of the younger self drive travellers, it was due to our noise and disturbance potential. Now I realised that they just did this for a bit of entertainment.Now what entertainment could they possibly get from us I hear you ask? Well, as you know we are camping. This involves the usually straight forward and occasionally easy task of setting up a tent. However, in this case, in the possibly force 10 gale that I am convinced they knew was coming, the tent setting up business was in no way straight forward and was certainly not easy!

Picture the scene; large tent, 2 people holding a large piece of canvass that unless you had know better, was essentially a sail, thick dust and sand blowing around everywhere and then the worst thing happened... Jemma broke a nail.I, at this point, am trying to hammer pegs into the, practically solid rock, floor while holding the aforementioned, large piece of canvass, and getting mouthfuls of dust

Anyway, we did eventually get the tent up without losing any limbs in the process and started to realise that it was a nice little campsite with nice green areas and rows of beautiful tall palm trees. We didn't do much for the afternoon but we managed to get down to the, again white sand and clear water, beach in time to see a fantastic sunset.

The plan was to get an early night but as we decided to go to bed the wind decided to pick up. I have camped in weather like that before but only in smaller tents which, ok are not that good for standing up in, but are a lot more secure when it's windy. The larger tent like ours has flexible poles which, when the wind blows, flex and then spring back into place with quite a large snapping noise as the canvass (sorry, very large sail) pulls tight again. I wouldn't as much say no sleep but definitely severely broken sleep is the best way I can describe it. At 6am we both decided it was pointless to try and get anymore sleep and got up to find that not only had the wind woke us up all night but it had covered everything in the outside section of the tent in a thick layer of dust. We opted for the pack up then shower procedure and after nearly losing the odd finger and parts of the tent went for the famous 'Don't bother folding it. Just stuff it in the boot' technique. We sat, shell-shocked, for about 5 minutes in the car before we eventually got showered and changed. We made time for a coffee at the camp site cafe before heading off through the gales towards Broome.

We arrive in Broome about 4 hours later after another 400 or so km's on the road. The driving is getting easier and we now see a 400km run as a relatively short one. On the way it was again, mostly scrub but broken up with intermittent termite mounds. Some of these were easily 2 metres tall and bulging as they have been extended over the years. At one point they had been thoughtfully decorated with safety helmets and one even had a 'blow up doll' builder attached to it. We were not sure what that was about. Those crazy Aussies eh!

Anyway it was about 1ish when we arrived in Broome and we immediately noticed the change in the temperature there. It had been getting a little warmer in each place we had stayed but we had travelled over 1500km's over the last few days and all of a sudden it was hot.We avoided the sun for a while and chilled out at the cafe just round the corner from the camp site and set up our medium sized tent on the small size tent site we had been given for the night.

The next day was a very expensive day... Unfortunately for me that was because I had to pay the car tax and nothing more exciting than that. It had not run out yet, we had up to the end of September, but this was the last large town in Western Australia and we had to sort it before we left the state.For Jemma it was not as expensive but it did involve a few new clothes from Target.

We walked through town (mainly to get some more tent pegs after the rock site/bending pegs incidents over the last few days) and immediately saw the Chinese influence over the town. Broome, and in particular Roebuck was formed in the 1880's as a pearling town and many of the original divers and boat owners were Chinese. Although you could see a higher number of Chinese or Oriental looking people around town than anywhere else we had been in WA, most of the actual Chinese influence was left with the architecture (including the phone box roof) where the tradition style of uplifts on the corners of roofs and finials was still used, and a couple of Chinese takeaways. Chinatown appeared to sell expensive pearl jewellery rather than having laundries and the like.Luckily for the divers (many died from hypothermia or the bends), the pearls are now cultured and grown in farms where they are suspended in nets just below the surface.That said Broome definitely felt like it had still kept some of the Asian influence and when that was mixed in with the obvious aboriginal population, white Australians and tourists it made a nice mix of cultures.

The evening sunset on Cable Beach was spectacular. We have seen a good few WA sunsets by now but this one was made that bit more impressive by the clouds. By that I don't mean the traditional English sunset (It just goes dark because the sun is behind the clouds) but there was enough broken cloud and interesting formations to make this one really different. We saw the 'heavily advertised' camel rides down the other end of the beach but as we had experienced the fun of camel riding we felt that the $60 for a 20 minute ride was a bit steep. Especially as there was no chance of a torrential downpour and running camels to make it anywhere near as interesting as the India camel ride.

The evening was finished off by a trip to the "world's oldest outdoor cinema" [as stated by The Lonely Planet] called Sun Pictures. Back home the theory of an outdoor cinema would have never been a viable business proposition. Let's face it, on the 3 nights a year when it's both dry enough and warm enough everyone in the UK gets down to Tesco and buys up all the readymade Barbeque meat. It would never have worked! Anyway, Sun Pictures is an outdoor cinema that was originally opened in 1916 as a Japanese Playhouse showing traditional theatre performances. It was then sold to one of the Pearling companies who converted it into a cinema. Over its time it has had problems with flooding on high tides and is now on the flight path of the airport (which is about 500 metres away). The original wooden and steel sheeted building, canvass deck chairs, and Batman was an interesting combination. But it was a good film in a place with a good atmosphere and complimented by a couple of Choc Bombs (Ice cream in cones with a thick layer of chocolate), and some salty popcorn, so a good night.

The next day was again expensive only this time it wasn't something planned like the car tax. We were up and headed up to the lighthouse at Gantheaume Point. This is at the end of Cable Beach and has great views of the beach from the cliffs. Unfortunately when we got there I realised that my camera had decided that 7500 or so pictures in a year was just about enough, and expired on me. It did still work a bit but the focus button wouldn't set. It may not sound like a lot but it did mean that the pictures were either out of focus or under/over exposed, so pretty much broke! After taking a few pictures and trying different settings I decided that it wasn't something I had changed somewhere and it was actually broken. The view from the lighthouse was good and the red of the rocks against the sea was a great contrast but I was in a bad mood by this point so Jemma avoided me for a little while (probably a very wise idea), before we headed off to find a camera shop to see if they could fix it. By the end of the next hour or so I had a new camera. It was annoying having to buy another one but it's always fun having new gadgets to play with so all was right again. I am sure I was a lot easier to be around after that point!!

Another Cable Beach sunset that evening and some pictures of the Camels this time while Jemma stationed herself on a nearby rock to read celebrity gossip magazines (borrowed from the camp site laundry room). As the camels left the beach and back to Camel land (or wherever they come from each day) we noticed a girl walking behind the train. She had a hi-vis vest on and was obviously part of the crew and was also carrying a canvass shopping bag. For a while we didn't realise what her job was until she then collected a big pile of camel poo and put it in her bag and continued along behind the camels carry out this task again a few more times before they were out of sight. Once again, all of a sudden, local government didn't seem too bad!

The next morning we knew we had to move to another tent pitch (we extended our booking but our plot had a booking on it) so we hung around for the people to move who were on the site we were told we could move to. By about 9.30 there was no sign of movement so I wandered down to reception to make sure everything was ok. After asking the lady behind the desk she then told me that yes, they had taken our money for an extra night but, No we were not going to move to the site we had been told and they hadn't really got us booked anywhere. After a bit of discussion around the points of whether I had asked to go to a certain pitch which was already pre-booked and told at the time, or whether they had just told me the wrong information (and also a brief double booking incident) we were allocated a new small tent area and I left to move the tent. Apparently I should have known all about the booking system (or inefficiency of) and it could not have been the fault of the Palm Grove Holiday Resort.After a snail like tent dragging manoeuvre across the site we were eventually ready to go out.

We visited Broome Museum, which was excellent. We were both a little wary of overpriced regional museums after the one in Denham but this one was really interesting with a lot of the history of the town and the Pearling and then another section with a lot of local history including Aircraft bombings in World War 2 and little obscure things like a list of all the registered cars in Broome in the early 70's. (Just to show how Broome has grown there were only about 30 at the time). We visited the Chinese Cemetery with engraved beach rock headstones but by this time it was starting to get really hot again (about 34 degrees) so we headed back to the corner Cafe and checked emails before doing a bit of blog writing up on the lap top.

It was also our 1 year travellaversary today so in the evening we splashed out on a meal rather than the normal 2 minute noodles. We had really nice spaghetti each and reminisced about all the places we had been so far over a good bottle of red wine. We fall asleep to the sound of the lad next door trying to explain the rules of poker to his mum (No. 4 of a kind is any 4 cards of the same value, not just 4's). Sorry Mum I am never going to try and teach you the rules of Poker...