Fake Grass - The World's Worst Invention

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Today we travel back to Broome. We’re really only going there because the only other place we can fly to from Kununurra is Darwin, but if we go there we’ll get locked up for two weeks when we get home. We‘re probably a bit "Broomed-out", but it still feels like a much better option than going home to a cold and miserable lockdown. The news from home gets worse by the day. There were 57 COVID cases overnight which is the highest number in about a year. We’re starting to think that it’s only a matter of time until the Delta variant gets into Western Australia, and if that happens while we’re still here we’re sure to get locked up somewhere; either here or when we get back home.

We’re driven from Emma Gorge to Kununurra airport by our guide Phil. We pass a hill where he tells us they used to do hang gliding.... well that was until one enthusiast managed to crash and kill himself. We can see the remains of the track up to the top, but we’re told there’s not much left of it and it hasn’t been used for many years. It’s good to know there are at least some tracks up hills here. Phil tells us that the Cockburn Ranges themselves have been hived off from El Questro and the government's still trying to work out to do with them. What is clear, he says, is that no one's allowed to climb them, even the lower slopes. Uh oh. I climbed one of them yesterday. Hopefully no one saw me. I wonder if anyone spends hours poring over satellite images looking for trespassers, and whether they can identify them using fancy face recognition software. I wonder what the penalty is for climbing a mountain that the government doesn’t know what to do with. It feels like I’m sure to get either locked up or locked down whatever I do in the not too distant future.

We pass the turn off to Wyndham and someone asks whether it’s worth visiting. I think Phil feels like he’s got to say yes, but I’m not sensing all that much enthusiasm. The Afghan Cemetery there is apparently notable for its large plots. It seems that the Afghans themselves weren’t too much larger than anyone else, but a lot of them were apparently quite attached to their camels and insisted on being buried with them. This doesn’t seem quite fair on the poor camels - as soon as your owner dies you have to die too. I guess that’s better than being buried alive; I assume they didn't bury them alive. I hope someone got paid well to dig the graves.

We cross Cheese Tin Creek, and Phil gives us the background to the name. In the early days of European settlement Afghan cameleers provided most of the local transport from Wyndham out to the cattle stations. There was a high demand for pork and bacon, but the cameleers were all Muslim and refused to carry it. Some of the station owners eventually managed to trick them by getting the store owners to pack it in cheese tins. Unfortunately the heat all got a bit much and the pork fat seeped through into all the rest of the goods they were carrying. The cameleers were understandably not all that happy about this deception and its smelly outcome, so dumped everything in this so-named creek.

We land in Broome. Accommodation was again very hard to come by, and the reviews of the only hotel we could get into were a bit less than glowing. As bad as they were, none of them thought to mention what must surely be the establishment's worst feature - fake grass around the swimming pool. This is one of my least favourite modern inventions, right up there with the leaf blower. OK, so you don’t have to mow it, but it looks diabolical. It’s also too hot to walk on when the sun's shining, which means there wouldn’t be too many worse places on the planet to put it than here.

We’re not feeling overly happy with our accommodation, but it's going to be alright we think. We’ll go on some tours, so we won't need to spend too much time at the hotel, and in a few days time we can fly home. Hmmm. It seems that just about every tour we might want to go on is booked out. We jump on the couple that aren’t, not caring too much about where they’re going, but are now starting to suspect that these ones are only available because they aren’t any good. We try to book our flight home using the credit for the flight we had to cancel previously. It seems however that this hasn’t been processed yet and mightn’t be for several weeks. I try to ring the airline but a recorded message tells me in a very cheery voice that I’m likely to be on hold for several hours…. I know, we should be grateful just to be here, in the sun, and not locked up at home staring out at the cold and gloom. I think we need alcohol to restore our perspective…..

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