Moonrise and four illegal tyres

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Back to civilisation

Knowing that we had a good four days in Broome and no driving for a while we were looking forward to settling in a campsite and seeing all the sights at a leaisurely pace. Well one caravan park tried to charge $40 for a camping spot, effectively a piece of grass and a toilet, and everywhere else was full so we ended up staying in the overflow site of a youth centre the whole time we were there and befriended a couple from the UK who were recently married and were touring the west coast together.

There wasn't much to do in Broome but compared to some of the places we had visited we were pretty happy. We spent a couple of days soaking up the chilled out ambience and beautiful surrounds of Cable Beach, which had the whitest sand we'd ever seen. We were both quite glad to be back on the coast after so many days driving through the outback.

Staircase to the Moon

The town was nice but really geared towards tourists, however the small museum was really interesting and documented the towns significance as a pearling town with lots of old artifacts, maps and other materials. We also finally sorted out our problem we had with what we originally thought was a slow puncture which turned out was due to having four illegal tyres on our van which we had been driving with ever since Darwin, luckily the company picked up the tab and we had ourselves four brand new tyres.

The final night for us in Broome coincided with the start of the monthly phenomenon of the Staircase to the Moon effect which is a view of the rising moon reflecting in the sand flats creating the impression of said staircase. As the time of arrival neared the whole of Broome it seemed turned out for the event but we still managed to get ourselves a good view which was spectacular, although our attempts at taking a photo were pretty poor. Afterwards we explored the small but interesting selection of wares at the night market and got ourselves some cheap Asian food as we sat on the beach watching the moon rise into the crystal clear sky.

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