Broome

Sunday, May 13, 2018

The flight from Melbourne covered over 1,900 miles/3,100 kilometers. Here is the flight track.

We arrived at lunch time and looked over the famous Cable Beach until our late afternoon camel ride on the beach. There are three different companies that provide the experience; here is what a caravan looks like.

Our hotel grounds featured a lot of wildlife. Here, wallabies. 

Here is a map of the northwest. Broome is the blue pin out to the west.

Broome has a population of 16,000, but touring tourist season, the population grows to 45,000! Broome has a pearl industry dating back to the 1880s; Aboriginals worked in the business in the early years, but were succeeded by Japanese divers. With the beginning of World War Two, the Japanese divers stopped working in the industry. 

During World War Two, the Japanese delivered four air attacks on Broome. Aircraft wreckage is still observable in the area around the harbor.

The next day, Monday, we took a float plane trip out to Horizontal Falls, the green waterfall pin on the map. The tour company has a lot of equipment at the site! Float planes, a helicopter, and smaller boats holding about thirty passengers that travel through the gorges. The view from the flight was gorgeous.

This is the base for the visit to the “falls.”

The tide height can be as much as five meters! Here, just one meter, growing to two meters in a little while. 

After our boat trip through the first gorge (we went once through the second, but after that there was too much water for a repeat), our pilot flew us around the area so we could see where we’d been. The upper gorge in this photo is the one we went through. One of the company’s boats just went through it and is circling around to go through it again. The second gorge has an impressive flow going!

We also flew over Cable Beach and our hotel on the way back to the Broome Airport. At high tide, the beach is just where the sand is bright. At low tide, as was the case here, the beach is quite wide. 

We learned that this area (the coast around Broome) has the biggest tides in the southern hemisphere (up to 10 meters/32 feet). 

They are not easy to see, but there are parked automobiles way out on the beach; we were told sometimes a car gets stuck in the sand and the tide comes up and covers the car. One of the camel caravans can be seen up on the bright part of the beach, just to the left of center (yellow arrow).

On Tuesday, we took a guided tour put on by the Broome Bird Observatory. Not only were the birds interesting, the scenery was tremendous.

In the afternoon, we took a tour on a hovercraft to see dinosaur foot prints. Here is the amazing hovercraft and a photo of a passenger standing in one of the footprints.

Here is the shoreline at low tide, showing mud and a lot of color. We enjoyed some snacks and a cocktail while watching the colorful sunset.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, we are driving north to Cape Leveque.

We flew from Melbourne across the country to Broome in Western Australia. We intend on visiting attractions around the city and then driving up north to Cape Leveque. We will be in the area will be for five nights.