Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 76 - Sunday July 24th 2016 - Broome, Western Australia

Well the day started out just the way that we wanted it to, relaxed and just a little bit slower. After getting through the shower block and getting dressed we put our new acquired outdoor chairs to good use by eating breakfast on the grass area outside the vans sliding door. Trev made bacon and tomato ketchup rolls and we set up the side table and munched away.

It was time to load up the van again though and head into the town or the area that they call China Town here in Broome. Now it’s really not what you are thinking at all. Chinatown here is not full of Chinese restaurants, no no. It’s an area of the town that was set up by the Chinese immigrants that moved here for the pearl industry. So it turns out that the Chinese and the Japanese were the first nations to successfully cultivate pearls. Broome as a town was built and expanded to what it is today on the back of a successful pearl cultivation business and they bought the Chinese and the Japanese here to help them establish this business.

They in turn established the oriental area and to this day it is the hub of the town. Rows or corrugated steel shops with big verandas still stand as they would have done back in the early 1960’s only now they are cafes and restaurants and gift shops and bars. Only the oldest open air cinema in Australia still exists in the form that it did back in the day.

Brooms history goes even further back though; we are talking about 1000BC when it was home to the indigenous people at least thirty thousand years prior to the arrival of the Europeans. The first recorded European to visit Broome’s shores was the explorer William Dampier in his boat The Cygnet, he later returned in The Roebuck (lots of things in the area reference The Roebuck) in 1699.

By the time of the 1850’s the first European settlers had arrived as farmers. It was the Europeans that discovered beds of the giant silver lip pearl oysters , the largest pearl shell oysters in the world growing naturally here. In November of 1883 the town that had grown out of these settlers was officially named after the then governor of western Australia Sir Frederick Napier Broome. By 1889 Broome was linked to the rest of the world as an underwater cable that linked Australia to Java came ashore at what came to be known as Cable Beach (we would go there later today). By the late 1800’s Japanese divers had been recruited to dive for pearl shell and by the 1900 Broome became a pearl capital, this was the golden age of pearl fishing. 80% of the worlds mother of pearl came from Broome and up to 400 pearl luggers would be waiting out in the bay at any one time. Broome’s population exceed 4000 and it became Australia’s most cosmopolitan and racially diverse town.

The growth in the pearl trade led to the cultivation program and the birth of Chinatown and we are back where we starred from.

Today they still cultivate pearl but in much smaller quantities, the towns major income is now from tourism.

We had parked up in the middle of the town but on getting out if the van we discovered a little bit of a disaster. As nice as the bacon sandwiches were this morning that Trevor had cooked he had somehow managed to put the rather full cooking oil container away on the food cupboard without putting the lid on. Now obviously when you drive a camper around the place things get jiggled around equally so by now that oil was over everything in the cupboard and leaking all over the floor. We both spent about thirty minutes trying to clean it all up the best we could before shutting the van door on it and heading off into the town, we could deal with the oil spill later!!

So back to us and china town today. We walked around the town, it’s certainly a lot more cosmopolitan than any other town we have been to since leaving Perth. There are all your coffee shops and pavement cafes and art galleries and your normal tourist tat shops. It just has that great vibe, something you can’t write down or really explain but it does feel like a nice place to be and again unlike all the other small Australian towns we had been to on the coast you even get some of your bigger brands here like Target, Woolworths and Coles, they even have a McDonalds!

After walking around the town we headed off to the tourist information centre. As we were here for longer than just a day we wanted to splash out a bit and do something a little different tomorrow. The trip we decided upon was Whale watching, something that we have tried twice before but although we have always seen whales its always been from a long way off so we were hoping that this time it would be different. We will let you all know tomorrow how that goes but get crossing your fingers now!

With our trip booked we walked back into the town centre and stopped at the dragonfly café for an iced coffee to watch the world go by for a bit. Once again Australian was slow, very slow but we eventually got our drinks and to be honest we had both had better iced coffee but the setting was nice (got to try and get a positive out of the situation). Coffee drank it was time to head off to the supermarket to get some provisions in.

We ended up in Coles Supermarket walking up and down the isles choosing food for the last five days of our trip. As we will be out in the wilderness of the Kimberley’s we figured it was best to get the food in here and take advantage of the choice on offer.

Shopping done and dumped off in the van it was time to leave Chinatown behind and head off to our second stop of the day Town Beach.

Town beach as it is called is the closest accessible beach to the town as most of the beachfront on Broome (well the area closest to Chinatown) is actually quite swampy and has lots of reeds and mud flats whereas town beach is your golden sand variety complete with café right on the beaches edge. It was busy as you would expect yet again no one was in the water. Now that might have had something to do with the caution crocodile signs that lined the beach, I mean would you risk getting in? We certainly didn’t and nor did anyone else that we saw.

We had actually come down to the beach in search of wreckage! In 1942 the Japanese had destroyed sixteen flying boats anchored in the bay at Broome and to this day at very low tide you can sometimes see the wreckage. We searched right up the beach but saw nothing! Later we were to discover that apparently you can only see them at certain times of the year so obviously this was not one of those times….shame.

We left the hustle and bustle of town beach behind and headed off to Cable Beach.

Cable Beach is claimed to be one of the most stunning beaches in the world with 22km of pristine white sand, Pindan cliffs (Pindan is a name given to the red soil of the south western Kimberley region where we are, so what it is saying is red soil cliffs) and clear turquoise waters that you can actually swim in!!

The beach is indeed stunning and it was also quite busy but because it is so huge we had no problem finding a spot of sand to lay on. Now for those of you that know Mr. T Blofeld well you will know that he loves his water sports! Yes, he loves to swim and is a real water baby so finally getting the chance to immerse his body in water was irresistible! He was in the Indian Ocean more as less as soon as Jonathan had managed to sit down.

Now Jonathan is no fan of cold water oh no, he was rather hoping that the water here would be as warm as we had experienced in Sri Lanka, I mean it was the same ocean after all, but no, the water here is cold, cold cold cold! Trev said that when a wave hit my belly my face was a right picture. I left the freezing cold (in my mind) water to Trev to enjoy whilst my dignity was still intact!

We were however being typical Brits abroad with no sun protection on what so ever and it was 30 plus degrees with a coastal breeze, just the conditions to make you burn. We laid out in the sun for just over an hour before we figured we needed to move before we got burnt to a crisp! We retreated from the sand, showered off our feet and retreated to Zanders (a rather posh restaurant on the beach) for a quick bite to eat. We both picked the same thing on the menu, we always do as there is never any shift. Today’s shared choice was calamari in szechuan spices with a jalapeno mayonnaise….yum yum! Trev washed his down with more little creatures but this time not the pale ale kind, he went for the bright ale which was clearly code for regular lager, but it wasn’t, more hoppy and delicious!

As we were eating our rather late lunch a train of camels started to make their way down onto the beach. They are something of a relic of the past, the way things used to be transported here due to the searing heat and the dessert type landscape. Today they are a tourist attraction but the sight of them all setting off in a line was still impressive to see.

It was time to move on again this time just along the coast to Gantheaume Point. We had to navigate a rather poorly maintained unsealed road to get to it and the van was shaking all over the place but boy was it worth it once we got to the headland.

So there are two striking features of this headland really the first being completely manmade and that is the light house. It’s certainly not a lighthouse how we know them, this is more of a metal scaffold tower with a lighthouse top but it does the same job I suppose? Next to the lighthouse is the old light keepers house which was more like a luxury ranch. It was now it private hands and boy it’s some kind of rather posh holiday home now with a stunning view.

The second striking point and the most beautiful is the geology of the headland itself. The bright right sand cliffs that drop into the ocean below, the layered iron ore coloured rock formations that make up the headland are just like no other. All pointy in flat layers, the layers all slightly different copper tones again as in the Karijini National Park they looked like they could have come from a Martian landscape. With the Indian Ocean as a backdrop, that iron red against the blue ocean made for a photographers dream and we both took far too many photographs. The headland is also famous for another reason but just like the wreckage of the planes at town beach they are only visible at certain times and at a very low tide and these are dinosaur feet.

Yes, apparently you can go walking on the sands on the beach here and find casts of dinosaurs feet. It would have been fascinating to see them but alas as all the guides told is them being very illusive and there being so signs it just sounded like a bit of a wild goose chase so we didn’t even go off to look. The rocks and the views were more than enough reason to come down here to be honest.

It was time to get back to camp and sort out our oil leak in the van. We had been running around a bit all day and we still had not put the shopping away and we had a hot date tonight at the open air cinema in town so things needed to be done. When we got back to the campsite someone else had set up hone in our bay with a huge trailer tent and then gone off as there was no car in sight……grrrr, just when we needed to sort things out in the van as well!

We went up to reception to explain what had happened and to be honest at first they all seemed a bit blank. It turns out that a group of three friends had just come into the park and they had just presumed despite being given clearly numbered pitches that they would all be next to each other. They had set up and gone out so now we had to wait for them to return to move! Some of the friends were still on site though so they gave their friends a ring to tell them what was going on and we assured that they were on the way back. About fifteen minutes later we were back on our pitch, no real drama but we could have done without it. There was time though for us to shower and change and get ready for a night out away from the van.

One thing about van life is the evenings. You end up going to bed far earlier than you would normally as your movement is restricted and the most comfortable place to be is in bed, that’s the other reason we bought the outside chairs, to give us another option if the weather was good enough.

Anyway tonight we were to walk back into Broome for a night under the stars at the open air cinema. We set off on foot again and it took us just over an hour to reach the town. Trev was really done in by the end of the walk and it took us a while to find Bluey’s Fish and Chip Shop. We sat down on the outside picnic tables and tucked in although Jonathan steered clear of the chips, saying the size of his stomach feels like he is with child and it’s a horrible feeling so a garden salad it was for him (small steps and all that).

After dinner we still had some time until the film started so we went to a local bar more or less opposite the cinema and paid a ridiculous amount of money for two beers, at $10 a pint that’s worse than a cruise ship!

It was time to cross the road and enter a real piece of cinema history, the sun picture house garden as it’s called. It is in fact the world’s oldest operating picture garden and it is indeed, well the screen is, in a garden. The place has been operating for more than 100 years and it still really retains that feeling of a bygone time.

As you enter the cinema foyer you are greeted by rows of the old cinema projectors from right across the years from silent film days right up to the 1980’s. It’s the one thing that has been upgraded in the cinema, the projector and the sound system. Half the cinema is under cover, a corrugated barn roof type structure with the front half being in the garden itself with nothing but the stars overhead.

As a side note the stars are another thing that is very different here. There are so many of them, the sky at night really does twinkle, we both have commented on it every night in the campsite.

Back to the Sun Picture House though. The seating is in rows of linked seats only the design of the chairs is just like an old Victorian cloth deckchair, not the most comfortable of seat especially on the back of the head as you are sat down so low but very fitting and it’s great to see that they kept them rather than opting for a modern solution.

We watched what were obviously locals leave the screening before ours and they had all bought pillows or cushions with them, obviously in the know about what was behind the wooden doors.

We bought some popcorn, we’re at the cinema after all and headed straight down to the front row and sat on an end, under the stars, the garden lawn at our feet.

The film that we had come to watch did not start well, mainly as whoever started it put on the wrong film so we sat through the opening titles of some film with George Clooney and Julia Roberts before a member of the audience got up to tell the staff what was going on. It was immediately stopped and corrected and that was us for the next two hours or so. So we had come to see the film Florence Foster Jenkins with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant. We both laughed out loud many times as did most of the audience, it’s a great film based around a true story of the most awful singer to play a night at the Carnegie Hall in New York, see it of you can it’s worth the time.

Film over and we ordered a taxi back to the campsite for the princely sum of $20. There was no way that we would be walking back now but we weren’t ready for bed just yet. We sat back at the van drinking wine, talking that sort of thing. We actually had nothing to do in the morning as we had to wait for midday to get picked up for our trip so a later night was fine.

We had done a lot today and Broome had succeeded in seducing us with its charms. Its most definitely a jewel along the western Australia coast and a must see if ever you are up this way and we still have another night to go.