Broome, the End of the Savannah Way

The Savannah Way is the route between Cairns in Far North Queensland and Broome in Western Australia's Kimberley.  It's taken us almost 2 months to traverse the Top End of our continent.  We could have taken much longer and there's still plenty for us to see on our next trip.

We've made it to Broome on the west coast and our first impressions are, well, meh!  Perhaps our expectations of Broome were a bit high, but we think it is overpriced and underdelivers.  It's not really "RV friendly" and seems to be geared towards fly-in tourists who stay in resorts and who have 5-star tastes.  Ah well, enough whinging and on to the positives.

Broome was built around the pearling industry and the best south sea pearls in the world come from the waters around Broome.  We visited the Pearl Luggers display and saw a couple of the early pearl lugger boats, the Sam Male and the DMcD.  Early pearl diving was done in a diving suit with a heavy brass helmet.  On board, the "tender", turned the handle to make sure air was delivered to the diver walking on the sea floor, and also to interpret the various tugs the diver pulled on the line.

There are several statues to those who developed and worked in the industry and a memorial to those divers who have died.

We drove north to the Willie Creek Pearl Farm.  We missed the tour, which was just finishing as we arrived, so we explored on our own.  This machine which looks like a barbecue is a pear shell cleaning machine.  The water around the mangroves was crystal clear.

We were back into the red dust when we turned off the highway and the red dirt suddenly changed to white as we drove through the flood plain on our way to the pearl farm.

The west coast has magnificent beaches with long expanses of white sand.  The tides in Broome are the second highest in Australia at around 10 metres - second only to Derby.

Cable Beach is probably one of the best known beaches in Australia.  It's famous for the camel rides tourists can take along the beach at sunset.  We saw some camels making their way to the beach.

West coast sunsets are spectacular.  Many people head towards Cable Beach each evening to watch the sunset and we joined them.

Tomorrow we'll be starting to make our way south along the Great Northern Highway.

Are We There Yet.....

We continued westwards through the Kimberley.  We stopped off at Halls Creek to look at the Yarliyil Art Centre.  There are many Aboriginal Art Centres as we travel around and we often stop off for a look.







We camped at Ngumpan Cliffs about 100km east of Fitzroy Crossing before heading to the west coast.  We took photos of the lovely sunset and Robert got up to take some sunrise photos too.

We're well into Western Australia now and have hit the west coast at Derby (pronounced Dirby, not Darby).  As we've driven through the Kimberley we've seen plenty of boab trees with their fat, bottle shaped trunks.  These trees start off with brown bark which turns grey as they age.  The bark is smooth and dense and looks like grey stone   The trees certainly have character and many of them look very wise.  There are plenty of them in Derby with their large woody nuts which artists harvest and decorate with pokerwork.  The Prison Tree was used to house aboriginal prisoners en route to Broome.  These days the sign says snakes live inside the trunk.

A couple of days in this northern coastal town has been very restful.  Derby has the largest tides in Australia at around 11m, and the 8th largest in the world.





We've been to the jetty at high and low tide to get a feel for this phenomenon.






Today we visited the nearby Mowanjum Art and Cultural Centre where we watched a short DVD about the Wandjina figures and saw many lovely paintings.  Tomorrow we're off to Broome.

G'Day WA

Shortly after leaving Zebra Rock Mine we arrived at the WA/NT border.  Western Australia has very strict quarantine regulations and we'd managed to eat all our fresh fruit and vegetables and honey.  Our car and caravan were inspected and declared OK and we were allowed into Australia's biggest state - about 1/3 of the total mainland land mass.  About 35km along the highway we stopped off at Kununurra to replenish our food stores.  Our next stop is the Bungle Bungle Ranges.

We spent a day exploring the Purnululu (Bungle Bungle) National Park and World Heritage Area.  We drove along the access road from our campground for about 90 minutes to reach the ranger station where we picked up a map and information about things to see.  Only tents and single axle camper trailers are able to camp inside the park.

We headed south to the Piccaninny area to see the amazing striped domes the Bungle Bungles are famous for.  We walked around the domes and then walked on to Cathedral Gorge.  The stripes on the domes are caused by iron (the orange stripes) and cyanobacteria (the black stripes).  The iron and bacteria form a coating which protects the underlying sandstone.  If the coating is damaged, the sandstone begins to erode so this area is very fragile.

We found Cathedral Gorge to be a very spiritual place. With it's high ceiling and sandy floor we could easily imagine ancient ceremonies taking place here.  It was also a lot cooler in the shady gorge.

After walking for a couple of hours we returned to the car and drove to the northern section of the park where we had our picnic lunch at the Echidna Chasm car park.  The scenery here was very different to that in the south, with large sandstone escarpments.

We set off walking again.  Cherryl opted out of the walk to the chasm along the rocky river bed and headed for the nearby lookout to get a view of the valleys while Robert walked into the narrow Echidna Chasm.

We got back to camp at about 4.30pm after a busy day walking though spectacular landscapes.