Blogs from Broome, Western Australia, Australia, Oceania

Spring tide in Broome laps by the shore at High Tide and one has to walk about 300 metres to greet the low tide...only Nova Scotia has larger tidal flows. What will happen if we dip our toes in? Dinosaur tracks across the bay from Roebuck Beach...some of the largest bird migrations on the planet...art and culture of the World's oldest living civilisation...the First Nations indigenous people dreaming stories for over 60,000 years. The savage history following the coming of the white man...the clash of cultures...dispossession, disconnect, disadvantage to the aboriginal first inhabitants that has ensured...their human blight that many non-indigenous seek to avoid or forget. Red rocks millions of years old...red & orange tracks into the remote...but on a map...the Kimberley is only a speck on this sunburnt country I am blessed to call home. ... read more

Issy didn’t sleep very well. She says she woke up in the middle of the night convinced that there was an intruder in our room. I think she might have been taking just a bit too much notice of what we’ve continually been told since we first arrived here - "put all your valuables in a safe and make sure you lock and chain your doors at night; this IS Broome”. They make it sound like the backstreets of Johannesburg. Issy’s intruder turned out to be me, so just as well she doesn’t keep a baseball bat next to her side of the bed. We head off to Cable Beach hopeful that the crocs that have kept it closed for the past two days have taken their business elsewhere. The “beach closed” signs seem to have ... read more

Our accommodation is very nice, but neither of us are quite sure it’s as nice as the exorbitant price suggests it should be; or at least the exorbitant price that we’re paying. We got chatting to a couple at the pool the other day, and she let it slip that she’d negotiated a “special” rate with manager. When pushed further we learned that she and her husband were paying roughly a third of what we’re paying, for exactly the same type of room. Huh? What? A few dollars less we could cope with, but a third! There didn’t seem to be much to chose from anywhere in town when we booked this place so we thought we’d better jump on it straight away whatever the price, or risk having to sleep on the beach. We now ... read more

We seem to have gotten ourselves into a real routine here. We’ve been parked in Broome for so long now that this is no longer a trip; it’s turned into a static beach holiday. We think we’ve decided to go home in a few days, so we can’t even vary the routine by spending the morning trawling through Booking.com and flight schedules... well not usefully anyway. We have lunch by the pool and I watch the football finals on the TV. I could be doing this at home, although that mightn’t be quite as much fun; it’d be cold for starters. On the off chance that he haven't quite yet convinced ourselves that we've got into a routine here, we again head off for our now customary sunset stroll along the beach. Issy thinks I might ... read more

We wake to the news that there’s been another spike in COVID cases back home. The number of new cases had been going down for a few days so we’d hoped the end of lockdown might not be too far off. It seems further away than ever now, so we spend the morning trying to work out our next move. It seems a no-brainer to stay either here or in Darwin where it’s warm and free, but we can’t stay away forever.... or can we says Issy. Hmmm. I wonder who we're going to get to mow the lawn. As usually happens in situations like this we spend several hours poring over Booking.com and flight schedules, and then decide we should wait a few more days before doing anything precipitous. I’m not sure what we think's ... read more