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Published: October 10th 2009
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Day 166 - Broome
We’re starting to get over the 5am automatic wake up now and instead are managing to reach 5.40am, waahooo!
The early morning low tide will reveal more of its ancient secrets this morning, Dinosaur footprints! Isn’t it beautiful that this stunning place is drawing on it’s natural history aswell as it’s Pearling industry and fabulous beaches to entertain the masses.
Just to make sure that we don’t end up swimming with the tide again we head off early this morning in order to make it in plenty of time for the anticipated low tide at 7.14am. The kids are wide awake and raring to go!
Gantheaume Point is home to the 120 million year old footprints and this fragile area gets pounded upon by us tourists every time there’s a low tide and the chance of seeing the exposed pieces of history. We clamber over the rocks to get down on to the reef and try to walk as considerately as we can all the while looking for the footprints. There are six different shapes here somewhere and the search is on!
The tide height today is 1.36m so should be low
enough for us to spot all three sets of prints available. It’s not long before we find the first set, they’re a bit ‘arrow’ like and have us all laughing because they are each facing in the opposite direction!
It’s strikingly beautiful here, the colours of the rocks are awesome and the deep turquoise sea, wow, you could just sit here for hours.
Zali is an excellent wildlife spotter and finds us an octopus hidden under a rock! Cool! Darryl finds a couple of pretty big clams too which are just sitting waiting for the tide to swallow them up again.
The second set of footprints was harder to find but we uncovered them eventually and they were a totally different shape to the first set! We never did find the third!
The tide was starting to catch up with us again so we clambered back up the top in search of Anastasia’s Pool which was carved in to the rock by a former lighthouse keeper for his arthritic wife. The kids had a dip in the pool but then all attention was turned to a dead crab being dismembered by a pack of ants!
On the way back to the cars we spotted a huge nest up the lighthouse tower belonging to a family of Osprey. These beautiful birds have picked a good home with plenty of fresh fish on their doorstep!
Somebody said something about surf being up so we all turned tail and headed for the beach! Lachy had a good go on the boogie board and Belinda caught a couple of waves on her board whilst Nige instructed, Darryl watched, I pointed the camera and Zali dug holes in the beach! You don’t get much better than this!
The early start in the morning had made us a bit peckish so we went back to camp for a gorgeous curried-egg wrap! We’re off the bread at the moment in favour of wraps, they’re great! Healthy eating is the way forward, with the exception of the odd intake of Spam!
Darryl has been doing his best to hunt out bargains lately and today he surpassed himself with a stash from the trash! Out of the skip came a pair of Havana (quite posh apparently) thongs, a large piece of foam, an outside light and a shopping bag! The light
was donated to the Elliott family for their camper trailer and the foam was sliced in two so we now have sleeping mats for the tenting expeditions! We had the biggest laugh with the thongs when we realised sometime later that each foot is a different size! Oh well, who will ever know!!
Up til now, we hadn’t tried out the swimming pool on the site so decided to put it to the test and it stood up pretty well! There’s plenty of space to play with the kids and it even has a waterfall you can swim under and sit inside! It’s great fun but we still end up back on the beach for sunset! We tried our hand at a few sunset shots, Nigel’s are brilliant and ours are getting better! There was time for a few more spooky shots of the kids when it was dark and then we all cycled home. At least the bikes are getting a good work out whilst we’re here!
At some point today we all (Belinda & Nige plus us) sat and discussed our plans for a trip up the Dampier Peninsula which is a partly sealed road before
it turns to the dreaded combination of sand, gravel and dust with of course those teeth rattling corrugations! We’re not sure anyone back home really gets what we’re talking about when we’re describing these roads so as soon as we can we’ll upload the video we took going into the Bungle Bungles, you’ll laugh your heads off! Anyway, we’d thought about hiring a 4WD that all of us could get in (that’s ‘us’ being us and the Elliott family) then just slinging in then tents and heading off but it’s a bit expensive so we’re all having second thoughts about that. Obviously we could go in our car, it’s a 4WD and is more than capable of making the journey but should anything go wrong it’s our budget that takes a whack and we’ve still got things we want to do. It can be very costly breaking things in the more remote areas and we talked to a young family today who have experienced just that. Their trip has taken them on every outback road you can imagine so far and they even did the fabled Gun Shot crossing going up to Cape York with their camper trailer. This crossing
is extreme and can be avoided by taking the by-pass road but this chap decided to go for it and he did get through but broke his CV joint here and then at Mistake Creek did the front diff just by taking the ‘wrong’ route across which cost him $6000 to put right! A bill like that would seriously curtail the remainder of out trip which is why we have to think very carefully.
While all this discussion was going on a lady came over to us to share her recent experience on the Cape Leveque road (the road up the peninsula). They’d driven up there for a magical few days in their own 4WD and broke the CV joint and then had a separate issue with lack of oil pressure - they limped home after a temporary fix was applied in the Beagle Bay community and the car is now in the garage. She put both of the breakages down to the corrugations and her interpretation of the road condition was “dire” and one of the worst she’s seen in a long time! I guess you would feel like that if you were facing a hefty bill from
the garage though, hopefully it won’t be as dramatic as their journey.
In the end we looked back at our original plan to see if it was something that we’d always intended to do. It wasn’t and so it’s been put into the ‘to do’ pile along with the whole Gibb River Road, Central Desert, Gove Peninsula and the Northern Territory in the Wet!
Not sure what tomorrow has in store for us yet, maybe a trip to the markets and the museum but definitely another trip to the beach!
Love to everyone
Dar and Sar
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Gary
non-member comment
Wise choice
Sounds like you have made a wise choice in bypassing some of the 4WD tracks. The cost of some misadventure sure would put a big dent in your plans. Who would have thought that repairs like you mentioned would be $6000??? We know from just a short 10k trip into 80mile beach how bad the corrugations are. And I suspect ours wasn't too, too bad. Keep up the good blogs. I am slowly catching up Gary