Tide Swallows Cars

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Today we’ve booked a tour to the Willie Creek Pearl Farm which is about 40 kilometres north of Broome, out on the west side of the Dampier Peninsula. We’re collected by our guide and bus driver for the morning who introduces herself as Lisa.

Lisa tells us that to be a true Broome local you need to satisfy three criteria, excluding presumably that you need to live here. You need to have a boat in your driveway. Apparently it doesn’t necessarily need to be functional, it just needs to be visible, in your driveway. You also need to drink a lot, and have a dog to take for walks along Cable Beach with other local dog walkers. We’re also told that houses in Broome don’t have gutters. It seems that it rains so hard that if they had them they’d just overflow and maybe even get torn off. And no one in Broome has a letter box outside their house; they all have post offices boxes, and queue up outside the post office every day after work, or after collecting the kids from school, to collect their mail. It’s not entirely clear why this is the case; lack of hospitality staff seems to be an issue here, so I guess it could be the same for postmen.

We head off up the Cape Leveque Road and then turn off onto the track that leads in to the Farm. It’s more than a bit rough and bumpy, so much so that they apparently need to replaces their buses every couple of years. We arrive and are given some background to pearl production, and then head off for a cruise along the wide expanse of the Creek. We’re told that jumping in for a refreshing dip might not be all that advisable; the Creek has three resident crocs, a gent named Nigel plus his two girlfriends. Cable Beach apparently ends on the south side of the Creek, and cars often drive up here from Broome along the beach to fish. Some of them even make it back; we’re told however that between ten and twenty are lost each year when their owners leave them on the beach while they go fishing, and come back to find that the tide‘s swallowed them up. ...and I thought the guy at the rental car office told us not to drive on the beach because we might get bogged…. The tour ends, of course, in the Farm’s shop, where we’re encouraged to make purchases. The tour has emphasised the long and very manual labour intensive process required to churn out even a single pearl, so I guess the eye watering prices shouldn’t come as a total surprise.…

We head out to watch the sunset along a relatively isolated section of Cable Beach. A sign at the start of the track in said that it was half a kilometre to the beach, but failed to mention that it would be roughly double that to the water's edge at low tide. The beach is a massive expanse of virtually deserted sand, and the sunset is spectacular.

We head off in search of dinner to the Mangrove Hotel which enjoys a commanding position on a hill overlooking Roebuck Bay. The grassy dining and drinking area is massive, and this seems to be Broome party central... well maybe just one of several Broome party centrals; we passed Matsos Brewery on the walk here, and the noise coming from inside suggested that that would probably give the Mangrove a run for its money. We've heard a lot about the famed "Staircase to the Moon" which occurs when a full moon is low in the sky across Roebuck Bay at the same time as the tide is out. This apparently gives the illusion of steps leading across the tidal flats to the moon. The Mangrove would seem to be a prime spot to watch this from, but we’re out of luck tonight - no low tide and no full moon. We thought we got lucky, but the moon turned out to be a plane coming in to land; the reflections off the water did look at least a bit like they might have been coming off the tidal flats, although alcohol might have started to interfere with our perceptions by then. I hope the Western Australian health authorities won’t have to rely on the hand written check-in register at the door to contact trace a COVID outbreak; the entries from early on in the night are at least partially legible, but the names and contact numbers from later on are anyone’s guess…

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