Blogs from Broome, Western Australia, Australia, Oceania - page 2

COVID cases are continuing to climb at a slightly alarming rate back home, and lockdown restrictions now include a curfew. This doesn’t sound all that appealing so we decide to stay on up here for a few more days in the seemingly vain hope that things on the home front might soon improve, even if the weather doesn’t. Our not so salubrious accommodation has run out of rooms, so today we have to move. There seemed to be only one room left in the whole town that was available for us to move to. We hope it's slightly more salubrious than the one we've left; the price suggests we should be getting Buckingham Palace. I take a quick look at the weather forecast. I’m not sure why; we’ve scarcely seen a cloud since we left home ... read more

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 ... read more

We decide to give ourselves a day off from sight seeing. News from home suggests that they’re going to be locked down for at least the next two weeks so we take our cue to spend the day trying to work out how and where we’re going to extend our time up here in warmth and freedom. We briefly consider heading across to North Queensland until we realise that this is now also a COVID hotspot, and if we go anywhere near it they’ll lock us up and throw away the key when we get home. (I'm not quite sure why but "locked up" somehow sounds a lot worse than "locked down".) We decide to opt for a few nights in a tent in the Kimberleys near Kununurra, followed by a week in Darwin. It’s a ... read more

Today we head back to Broome. We’re feeling a bit sad as we leave our little shack in amongst the sand dunes. Well maybe shack's underselling it a bit. The resort calls it a "villa", and whilst it’s certainly very nice, I usually associate villas with mansions high on the cliffs of the French Riviera. The name does at least differentiate it from the tents. Like just about everyone up in this neck of the woods, the young lady who checks us out isn't an Aussie; she’s from the UK. We ask her if she’s stuck here due to COVID. Every time we ask any of the many European and South American hotel and restaurant staff up here this question we get the same response - they say "yes", but with big smiles on their faces, ... read more

First stop for today is Gantheaume Point, which is near the southern end of the peninsula that Broome sits on. There’s a lighthouse here, but it looks more like someone’s plonked a large lantern on a water tank stand than the sort of lighthouses we're used to seeing. The red rock formations are spectacular. There are supposed to be dinosaur footprints here, but we’re struggling to spot them. Maybe they were baby dinosaurs, or, more likely, we wouldn’t know a dinosaur footprint if we tripped over one, which we may well have. We stop briefly at the port, which doesn’t look anything special, not that I’m sure why we thought it would. Next cab off the rank is a lookout over the turquoise blue waters of Roebuck Bay. We wander from there down through Chinatown. This ... read more