G: After 5,600 km we’ve arrived in Broome. Broome is WA’s answer to Byron Bay. Instead of ‘hippies with money’, the dominant tourist set here is the ‘Howard generation on super’. For instance, the local craft market doesn’t have a chai tent, sellers of incense or Buddha statures or that incessant bongo drumming. The famous Cable Beach is beautiful and pounds out friendly but powerful surf. The township is built on Roebuck Bay several kms from Cable Beach. The tourism industry is thriving with an odd combination of young European backpackers driving cheap beaten up cars and tent camping. And, the grey nomads in big 4WDs and all mod cons caravans or super ‘why leave home’ campervans.
We have been lucky to arrive in time to see the ‘staircase to the Moon’, a phenomena where Moon rise coincides with a super low tide over the mud flats that creates a scene that looks like a steps rising towards the Moon. Hundreds of people line the foreshore and vie for camera angles.
We are basking in the sunshine in Broome and enjoying a week off driving and dust. We have a fantastic campsite in a local caravan park from where we can gaze out over impossibly blue waters of Roebuck Bay. We are 50 metres from the water’s edge at high tide and 500 metres at low tide – the tidal range is 8 metres.
Unfortunately, today is howling windy and I was up at midnight banging in some extra tents pegs but otherwise it’s been very relaxing. We are having a week of hanging about the beach, Noah has hired a surfboard at Cable Beach, we've been out on a fishing trip on the Dampier Creek and the girls are going on a camel ride this afternoon.
We will hit the corrugations and dust again on Sunday when we drive up to Cape Leveque.
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