Blogs from Western Australia, Australia, Oceania - page 10

We wake to more bad COVID news from back home; another twenty-one cases yesterday, and there's now talk of the lockdown being extended for at least the next two weeks. The prospect of going home and being locked up in the cold and gloom is not feeling all that attractive, so we start to discuss the possibility of extending our stay up here in the warm sunny COVID-free north west of our vast land. Our credit cards are just about maxed out, so we might need to buy a tent and camp on the beach; well we would be able to if the the beach wasn’t closed; something about crocodile sightings…. We spend the morning looking at various extension options and then head a few kilometres out of town to the Malcolm Douglas Crocodile Park. Douglas ... read more

We spend the morning sticking very determinedly to our pledge to do as much relaxing as possible while we're here. It’s not too hard sitting on the deck of our little hut in the sand dunes in amongst the trees. The birds are up to their usual escapades. Issy is too, trying to guess what they’re saying to each other. We agree that the very loudest one just sounds like it’s swearing at all the others. We decide that too much relaxation mightn’t be overly beneficial to our health, so I go to book for the tour we heard about yesterday to Jacks Creek. We were told that it was an information tour, whatever that might be. I think it might just be the non-fishing version of the other tour, the Jacks Creek Fishing Tour. This ... read more

The idea of coming to a remote and secluded resort on the near deserted Eighty Mile (actually 140 Mile) Beach at what was supposed to be the tail end of our trip was to get some total relaxation before going back to the not so relaxed vibe of suburbia. Our beloved Qantas put paid to the bit about this being the last bit of the trip by cancelling our flight, and the new COVID outbreak means that we’ll now be doing a lot of relaxing when we get home .... because we won’t be allowed to leave the house. However we’re not letting any of that minor detail derail our plans for our time here. I spend the morning reading a book on our deck. I have to remember to read it slowly. This isn’t just ... read more

We’re up at 5.30 am for today’s little exercise, a tour to Windjana Gorge out in the remote Kimberley about 350 kilometres inland from Broome. Our guide introduces herself as Michelle. She looks about 30, but she tells us that she first came to Broome on her honeymoon in 1993. ... and I'd always thought that we didn't allow child marriages here in Oz. We’d thought that Broome might be suffering from a lack of overseas tourists due to COVID, but it seems that this has been more than compensated for by overseas travel starved Aussies who’ve decided instead to holiday in their homeland. Michelle tells us that the permanent population of Broome is 14,000, and in a normal non-COVID affected tourist season this swells on average to somewhere around 48,000. The tourist office told her ... 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