🔭 BROOME’S JUNE MOON

💌 Hi everyone, love from us both xx

Broome is the destination, the plan was to time it around the local phenomenon, Staircase To The Moon.  When the tide is extremely low and the sky clear on a full moon,  the reflection on the exposed mudflats of Roebuck Bay creates the optical illusion of a golden staircase  … leading all the way up to the moon.

🚎🚗 Port Hedland ▶ Broome

Port Hedland had the usual termite mounds bordering Highway 1, some of them with a Pilbara twist. After an evening of moral boosting 🍺🍺 it appears maybe 50 of the local miners came up with a plan.  💭 psstt .. ssshhh ..  guys, let’s cap termite mounds with our helmut’s 😀 👷👷  Wish I could include that pic, looked funny.

Around town Cyclone Warning signs are everywhere, with adjustable status levels. Roundabouts, shopping centres, wherever the busiest areas are and for a visitor. Seeing the current status say ALL CLEAR,  even seemed a little scary.  After passing one as we went around  a roundabout I asked John if he could go around again so I could take a quick pic 📷 but I was too slow turning the camera on.  One more time please, John ? We’ve got a big caravan behind us, we’re looking a bit foolish and he’s being extremely patient then would you believe I pressed the off button by mistake.  👎 … who wants to see a cyclone sign anyway.

🏀 Port Hedlands’ fancy Aquatic Centre 🏊 ⚽

It was easy to admire Highway 1’s roadsides … all beautifully mown.⤵ After a while though we started thinking it couldn’t possibly be all the farmers’ efforts. So we clocked it .. a shocking 400 kilometres, both sides. Fire break ? More time to avoid animal collisions ?

👆Hard to comprehend

Everyone stops at Roebuck Roadhouse, or should, it’s the best roadhouse ever. 🏪

Cup of coffee = coin donation ☕
Amenities = clean as a whistle 🔍
Clientelle   = glamorous ⤵

We picked up supplies in Broome had a quick look around then headed straight for Quandong Point … to wait for the moon.

🐊 … shivers

North of Broome the road to Quandong was a 50k stretch of hard corrugated red dirt. There are no facilities, so conserving our fresh water became pretty important the minute we turned off the engine, as we’d already decided we would only be leaving Quandong … once.

For a fairly remote spot it was all action.  Beautiful stars 🌌 by night and exciting helicopters by day 🚁 transporting tourists and workers between the pearling farms, resorts along the Dampier Peninsular, Buccaneer Archipelago and the infamous Horizontal Waterfalls. The brochures describe the helicopters as local taxis  🚁, we’d see maybe 6 or 7 a day. The Pearl lugging boats were moored out in front so, with binoculars, we kept a tab on what was going on. Lot’s of little boats surrounding the main ship, divers doing their pearly thing.

🐊 First day there I phoned the Info centre in town to see if it was ok to swim at Quondong, the lady was negatory when she said ..  ‘You’re in crocodile country so no,  I wouldn’t swim there’.

A couple of hours later,  33° and with a friendly local fisherman up the beach saying it’s ok, we talked ourselves into running down for a quick dip but Jason .. I totally planned to break your PB if I saw a croc …. see you later, alligator 🐊

The Kimberley coastline has the biggest tides in the  southern hemisphere, a massive 10 metres or so.

Low

High

Is this lumpy rock ugly .. or pretty ?

One day a guy drove over from his camp in the next bay to ask if we had a satellite finder. John lent him ours but an hour later he came back asking John to go with him to help.  When John returned he had his satelite finder in one hand and a bag of fresh Mackeral fillets in the other. 🎏

All the time we were watching out for 🐊 Crocs,  but the fisherman was true to his word, we never saw one.  Swimming at Quandong was nerve racking though, short and sweet.

A week later, 3rd June, we woke to clear skies and the water gauge flashing empty, so we headed back into Broome to have a proper look around before … Broome’s Moon.

🌼Broome’s main street, low rise and so balmy

Exclusive Pearl shops mixed in with cafes and older style establishments ⤵

Inside, there is only half a roof ⤴

🎥 The only thing that gets wet is the screen.

Stats:

– The Kimberley region was home to the indigenous peoples for at least 30,000 years prior to William Dampier stepping off the decks of The Cygnet and on to Broome’s shoreline,  in 1688.

– 1850’s european sheep farmers 🐏 discovered the giant silver-lipped pearl oyster, Pinctada  maxima, the largest pearl shell in the world. Prior to plastics, the industry it generated was mother-of-pearl buttons with Broome producing 80% of the world’s supply .

– 1955, after plastics replaced mother-of-pearl buttons, an American/Japanese venture started culturing pearls, reviving the value of Broome’s pearl industry. In 1960 though, young Australian Lyndon Brown became the first non-Japanese person in the world to figure out the ‘cultured pearl secret’.

– 1889 An undersea telegraph cable linking Australia to Java and the crest of the world came ashore at  … Cable Beach.

– Actual Dinosaur footprints located around Broome are recognised as the most significant in the world. Tracks stretch for 80km, 120 million years old with over 20 species involved. The Brachiosaurus’ prints are an unbelievable 35 metres long. Visible only at certain low tides we don’t have our own pics as we didn’t get to see them, but you could Google it. I don’t even believe it and the brochure is in front of my face.

I was standing outside the Broome laundry waiting for the noisy washing machines to finish when, out of no-where, a full sized massive passenger plane came flying directly towards me, just above ground level.  At the last second the jet veered up, presenting it’s entire underside and revealed the end of the runway just across the car park and road, separated from the laundry by a couple of cars and a chicken wire fence.

The Broome night markets coincide with the Staircase to the Moon event so we had plenty of time to check out Cable Beach and have a swim before making our way there. It was so good not having to worry about 🐊 as  life guards were on duty.

Cable Beach deck chairs for hire 👒

As the sun set over Cable Beach people were picking their vantage spots on the other side of town at Roebuck Bay to see the moon rise. The markets had yummy food and along the waterfront people sat eating & drinking, waiting ….

.. waiting 🍹

Pretty impressive, you get about 10 minutes to try to capture the effect before the moon rises too high. We were pumped, it was good fun then a nice walk back to the van via fabulous Boabs along the waterfront.

We were so pumped we decided to break the golden rule of not towing caravans after dark by heading out of town for a cool evening drive. 100ks later we pulled into a roadside stop for the night with a convoy of 8 army vehicles, full of soldiers, driving in behind us. What’s going on … who would have thought soldiers would set up base camp alongside backpackers and caravaners.

What did they eat? Sausage sangers. Where did they sleep? On the dirt. Did they get a shower? No. But John and I slept like logs that night, surrounded by our own personal security detail.

Thanks guys, drive carefully 💋

Thinking of you all, we miss everyone and in the next few days we’ll be turning the corner at Derby to start heading east. Getting closer ❤

.. geez xxx