Broome-time

We were planning to leave Broome several days ago but are still here due to car difficulties...the poor thing's getting new "shockies" right now and after this, we hope, will be ready to get back on the road again.

It was a bit of a shock to find out that we needed to have this work done on the car at great expense AND that as they had to order the parts in, we would have to wait here for 5 days...however, Broome is a fantastic place to be stranded in and as it turns out, it's been a very interesting week.

As the car keeps draining our wallets, and staying in a town is always expensive, once we realised we were here for a few days we commenced looking for some kind of work. That didn't really come to fruition, but whilst scanning the noticeboards in town we came across an advert offering free camping in exchange for helping out with some gardening, so we responded...and have been living for free with Charles, an extremely eccentric English guy who runs "Broome Trike Flights", taking people up in his tiny microlight aeroplane. He's had a really crazy life - he's travelled all round the world and was the first person to cross the Sahara desert on a motorbike - took about a month, apparently.

He lives in a double decker bus on a property in the middle of an Aboriginal block near Cable Beach...it's a 15 minute walk to the beach with bars, cafes, hostels etc, but where we are is all dirt tracks and bush - it really feels like we're camping in the wilderness at times.

Charles has got electricity and he's plumbed in a toilet and shower...but hasn't bothered with a building around them, so the toilet just sits in the middle of some trees and bushes, making peeing a much more ambient experience!


We're camping in a corner of the property where he's build a treehouse for the little girl on the next lot - it's a really cute little camping area.

He's currently building an extension on his aircraft hangar so Laura and I have spent the last few mornings holding spirit levels, measuring posts and levelling concrete to earn our keep! The hangar backs onto Broome airport, and we can watch the planes - commercial flights and tiny private jets - taking off and landing from a distance of about 100 metres...it's noisy but exciting.



We're close to Cable Beach which is, according to tourist literature, rated one of the top three beaches in the world. It's certainly very beautiful, and we've been spending most of our time there when not doing building work for Charles. Last night was spent drinking on the beach with a group of other backpackers...we all wanted to go out but agreed that we were too poor, and resorted to a very teenage but enjoyable evening. It was beautifully dark and I saw my first shooting star. Mind you, the drinking was hampered by the liquor restrictions in Broome - our usual beverage of choice, 4 litre casks of, um, "wine" at the very affordable price of $8, is not available here: the maximum cask size on sale is 2 litres, at $14...this is apparently because there's a huge problem with street drinking and antisocial behaviour, due in part to the fact that there's a much higher proportion of aboriginal residents here than in the east coast and southern cities. It's awful that alcoholism is so rife, but I have to say that Broome is the first place where I've seen signs of indigenous people actually functioning within mainstream society: when all the parents drive up in their monstrous 4x4s to drop the kids off at school (it's just like being back in Dulwich Village) there are a few aboriginal children hopping out of cars just as huge and shiny as everybody else's, and for the first time I've seen a few aboriginal people around the place.

Laura and I are also looking for a new person to travel with as David is going to stay and work in Broome...I did enjoy travelling with him (and we are parting amicably!) but it's quite exciting to meet someone new. We think we've found the right person - another long-haired German boy with a guitar. Seems to be a theme...

Back in civilisation...temporarily...

The three of us, about to set off...a very tall blonde trio. On meeting Laura and David at our leaving party, my friend Cath exclaimed "You all look the same!!"

We've now arrived in the charming tropical town of Broome!! The trip has been fantastic and is going to be a bit difficult to summarise, but let me see...

We began our trip late after an excellent leaving barbeque/party...we were pretty impressed that we managed to conjure up some friends in Perth! We were supposed to be setting off on the road on sunday morning but as you can imagine, that didn't really happen...sunday saw Laura and I chasing round Perth in pursuit of various essentials that we'd left til the last minute, including pots and pans...we ended up just "borrowing" some from our kitchen. We finally hit the road at about 4pm, and didn't make it to our first destination (Cervantes) that day - we had to stop for the night in a little cray-fishing town, Lancelin.

We made it to the pinnacles desert for sunset on monday...it's a crazy place, really barren and sandy with these stunning limestone pillars everywhere. (Most amazing Australian scenery seems to be composed of limestone - Laura and I are starting an appreciation society). It's an eery place, like a moon landscape or something...sunset itself was a bit of a cloudy anticlimax, but hey.



After that we followed the coast north through various nice and less nice places, including the Shark Bay world heritage area, where we got to feed wild dolphins at Monkey Mia - very touristy and therefore not as amazing as it could have been, but still an interesting experience, especially as David got picked out of the group to hand feed a dolphin a fish...good times.



We also got to view some stromatolites - they're the world's oldest living organisms, and one of the oldest species in the world, but admittedly they just look like rocks with no discernable evidence of life - I don't quite understand how they work but it has something to do with blue-green algae, and we all evolved from them, basically. Tres cool.



Kalibarri national park was really beautiful, and was followed with our first night camping out in the bush: campsites provide bathrooms and sometimes kitchens, and are altogether nice and cosy, but also cost money, so we've camped for free probably about a third of the time, at rest areas (legal) and in the middle of nowhere (dubiously legal - I think it's ok as long as we're not in a national park or within 17 km of a campsite). On this particular occasion, we were actually planning to find a campsite but timed it wrong, so that before we knew it the sun was setting and the wildlife was waking up. It's recommended not to drive at night in the Australian countryside, and you can see why; the moment dusk descends, you become aware of all the animals in the bush and there are kangaroos skuttling across the road in front of you. If you hit a big kangaroo you can write off your vehicle, in addition to the pain you'd cause to the animal itself, of course. As it's winter here now and the sun sets at 5:30pm, our driving days are necessarily pretty short!!



We left the highway to spend a few days in a tiny place called Coral Bay, from which you can access the amazing Ningaloo coral reef - it rivals the Great Barrier one, apparently, though I haven't been there yet so have no basis for comparison. It was fantastic, though - you could snorkel straight off the beach among hordes of colourful fish and coral, and while we were there we also took a boat tour to swim with a giant manta ray.

As you may recall, in New Zealand I greatly enjoyed swimming with dolphins...Coral Bay actually offers the opportunity to swim with whale sharks, the world's biggest fish. It's one of the only places in the world you can do this, they can grow up to 12 metres or something in length, and from all accounts it sounded like an amazing experience. However, it also costs $350. The manta rays, therefore, were a cheapo alternative, but it was pretty cool nevertheless - the one we swam with was nearly 4 metres in wingspan, a monster shadow emerging out of the deep sea gloom. They swim so gracefully...it was very exciting and just sad that our guide kept pulling us out of the water - we probably only got about 15 minutes of actual swimming with the ray in total. Still, an interesting experience.


Next we headed inland for Kirrinjiri (sic) national park, which was REALLY stunning - an Australian woman told me she thought it was the best of all Australian national parks, and she's taken 14 months off work to travel round with her family in a campervan (there are a surprisingly large amount of Australians doing this - I think they home-school their children on the road!) so she should know. Four gorges meet at one point, and you can admire the sight from the cliff tops and also scramble down the gorges at different places. Some of the climbing was really tough and involved wading through water/scrabbling along limestone walls over rushing torrents/"spider-walking" between two narrow rock walls. We swam in freshwater pools under waterfalls...really idyllic and lovely.

However, all was not totally edenic as we were plagued by car problems, from Exmouth to Port Hedland. The last week has seen the three of us changing a wheel on the side of the road not once, but TWICE!!! Yes, the lesson in car maintenance that Laura and I took from Todd has really paid off - and I never expected to have to actually do any of this stuff!! I am very proud of us, though. The problems originated from the fact that our wheels were not properly aligned, which was causing our tyres to wear down disproportionately ( and also made driving in a straight line pretty challenging). We couldn't get a wheel alignment in Exmouth, so had to drive several hundred km to the next town, a little mining place called Tom Price...and on the way, on an unsealed, gravel road, one of our back tyres blew up. Laura, who was driving, handled it beautifully, and we found ourselves getting out the jack and changing the wheel. Several cars stopped to see if we needed help, but there was nothing they could do that we couldn't, so we handled it ourselves...and no, David did NOT do all the work! We split it equally...Germaine Greer would be proud (we're sick of sexist Australians; one man actually assumed that David would be doing "all the driving", since we're just girls. As if!!)

We got a wheel alignment in Tom Price, and 2 new tyres, and 1 second hand tyre. Then, surprise surprise, after maybe a hundred odd km on unsealed roads and then a couple of hundred on a tarmac road, the second hand one just disintegrated - it was really falling apart: must have been an incredibly old tyre. Obviously that's the risk you take when you get a second hand tyre, but we still feel ripped off by the stupid Tom Price mechanic...why is it necessary for car mechanics to be crooks??

Anyway, this time our wheel change was pretty much pit-stop style fast - off the road and on with the wheel in under 15 minutes. When we reached Port Hedland - a remarkably ugly city - a big port, where they do lots of mining and industry - we bought yet another new tyre, and (hopefully) our car woes are ended, for the moment.

A very featureless drive - 600 km on a pretty much dead straight road through flat, empty bushland - brought us to Broome, which seems like a really lovely, sunny city. We arrived just in time for full moon and last night there was a "full moon party" Thailand style, which was basically a fair on the beach, with a big crowd gathering to watch the moon rise; the tide goes out very far here, and the reflection of the moon on the mudflats is supposed to look like a "staircase to the moon", much hyped in tourist brochures. To be honest, it wasn't THAT special, but watching the moon rise over the sea with a beer in your hand is always going to make for a lovely moment, so I was not complaining.


This is an enormous lizard that we encountered in the middle of the road...it was nearly 2 metres long and caused David, who was driving, to go into full-on emergency-stop mode...I got a picture as it fled into the bush.

Hi there, I'm alive

But very busy, and access to the internet is limited. The roadtrip is proving fantastic, lots of very exciting and enjoyable things have been done which I will write about at length another time...in the meantime I'm in a small town called Exmouth, about halfway between Perth and Broome, near the amazing Ningaloo coral reef. Currently our journey is stalled due to some minor car problems which will hopefully be resolved in the next 30 minutes!!