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.