Blogs from Western Australia, Australia, Oceania - page 8

Today we fly to Perth as we finally start to make our way home. The number of new COVID cases per day back in Melbourne is in the hundreds and climbing steadily, and the authorities have now conceded that they can’t get it back to zero. This means that we'll be locked up until everyone’s had their jabs, which won’t be for quite a few months yet. We keep asking ourselves who in their right mind would willingly go back to that. Well us it seems….. only because if we stay here for much longer we’ll go broke. We stop at a petrol station to fill up our trusty hire car before returning it to Broome Airport. As often happens in these situations we can’t find the button to open the petrol cap. I push and ... read more

Yesterday's wind seems to have abated slightly so we head back down to Cable Beach. It mightn't be as windy, but it seems that the crocs are still here, so we head across to the Town Beach instead. There's no umbrella man here, but it's still very pleasant sitting under some palm trees on the grass above the sand. There are no signs here about the beach being closed, but I wonder how they can be sure that a few crocs haven't snuck around the point when no one was looking and taken up residence in the mangroves that are at one end of it. That looks to us like a perfect croc hangout. I go for a quick dip at the other end, making sure to stay very close to shore. The young lady sitting ... read more

We settle into our now very routine morning of lazing around our hotel room interspersed with the odd dip in the pool. It seems that we’re here in the middle of Broome’s annual Shinju Matsuri Festival, so we head off into Chinatown to watch the parade. We read that the name is Japanese for Festival of the Pearl, and it's been going for 51 years. It's intended to celebrate the four very diverse cultures which have come together here over the decades - Chinese, Japanese, Malay and Indigenous Australian. There’s a large crowd gathered on the side of the road to watch. Based on what we’d seen to date we could have been forgiven for thinking that the local population was made up entirely of grey nomads and nubile South American waitresses. This crowd is very ... read more

We wake to the news that the number of new COVID cases back home has gone down over night. This sounds promising... well it did until we found out that it had gone down by a whole one, from 80 to 79. After days of indecision we decide that today is the day we need to work out what we’re going to do and when we’re going to do it. After much further debate we opt for staying here in Broome for another five days and then going home. The only risk now is a case suddenly turning up in Western Australia in the next five days and us getting locked up up here. But hey, they haven't had a case for months now so we’d need to be pretty unlucky. We head off again to ... read more

We head down to Cable Beach for a walk, and see it for the first time with the tide in. Rocks that were several hundred metres back from the water the last time we were here are now being pounded by the surf. We'd wondered why someone had bothered to install a path up over the cliff behind the rocks; now we know. We wade through the surf around the rocks. In stark contrast to when the tide's out there aren’t so many cars here now, although we wonder how the couple that are managed to get themselves through the surf. There’s only one road down to the beach and it’s back behind us past the rocks, so they’ve either been here for several hours or they’re actually really well-disguised submarines. Fishing from the beach seems ... read more