Broome was a tourist hotspot. Visitors abounded, easily outnumbering the locals and giving the entire town a temporary, transient feeling, as if it only existed in peak season. All up we’ve spent a couple of weeks in spots where there was no other soul around, and the rest of the time we’d been able to hone our senses to spot grey nomads, TAWKs (Travelling Australia with Kids), and backpackers. Here though, there were too many sub-species of traveller to be identified. People were not on long-term adventures, but here for days, or several weeks, keen to fit as much in as possible for shorter term holidays.
The first we felt this abundance of people was at the visitor information centre, a must-do first stop in any town to get the local take on what makes a place great. Here, though, we landed ourselves in a queue an hour and a half long. Our queries were all of two minutes, being advice on whether the tide was low enough to walk out and see the Dutch Flying boats, sunk during a Japanese aerial bombardment in World War II, and whether it would be low enough to see the dinosaur footprints. (After our long wait, we learnt it was a no the first, and a yes to the second).
After re-centering ourselves (In air-conditioning, of course, to survive the 38 degree heat) we braved the crowds to watch the staircase to the moon, where once a month the full moon rises over the mudflats to the east of town.This creates an illusion of a broken staircase – if you squint a bit and apply a little imagination. Despite our doubts, and negotiating the people, it turned out to be a very impressive spectacle, one that phone photos don’t necessarily do justice.
Rethinking our initial hesitance to the town, we wandered through the night markets, the fairylight-lit drummers slowly pounding away the remaining reluctance we had. We were in Broome, and boy would we enjoy it! Except for the ridiculous heat, of course.
We spent the next days managing the heat by slowly rotating between air conditioning, the pool (cold) and cable beach (a very moderate 28 degrees). As the sun began to set we would head out; once to Gantheaume Point to clamber over red rocks at evening low tide, in search of fossilised dinosaur footprints; another night to Matso’s brewery to affirm their claim of a chilli beer being possibly the hottest in the world.
This rotation of beach, pool, air-conditioning and adventure was constricted only by the closure of Cable Beach due a shark sighting. Feeling starved of our beach time we headed to the beach for a sunset walk.
The deprivation of beach during the day was rewarded tenfold by viewing the beach at sunset. Shallow water was left behind as the tide went out, and reflected the golden glow of the sunset, giving twice the sunset and providing amazing imagery. The spectacle only grew once the sun was below the horizon, and the silhouettes of our fellow observers became incredibly defined. It was an incredible, and fitting, final West Australian coast sunset.
After weighing our options based on advice from fellow travellers, we decided to skip horizontal falls (which require high tide variance to be at their most impressive, and we’d spent the tide variance looking at the staircase to the moon) and skip Mitchell Falls (there has been very little rain in the past three wet seasons). Instead, we made one last trip to a re-opened Cable Beach to bid farewell, in what we suspected was our final swim until Darwin lest we be eaten by crocodiles.
And so, on another 38 degree day, we headed on to Derby. Here we learnt about 11 metre tides, the largest in Australia, where you could see the tide carrying branches, fish, and mud as they rapidly moved in across the mudflats. We learnt that to manage the daily swell, ships come in on high tide, rest on the seabed at low tide, and await the return of the high tide to depart.
We also learnt about Boabs, both good and bad. Boabs are trees with gigantic trunks, that can grow over thousands of years and store water to survive the dry season. The Boabs impressed us as a completely foreign type of tree in the landscape, which indeed they are, having come across on ocean currents from Madagascar millions of years ago. However each small town seemed to have a prison boab, a boab with a hollow middle where they would keep indigenous men, tied together in neck chains, when moving them between worksites. The relative commonness of these prison Boabs, and the treatment they represent, but that they are relatively unknown, indicates we have a long way to go to reconcile with our history.
This week really emphasised the difference between or short and long term travels. Short term you try and fit as much in, costs be damned, and see as much as is possible. You try and justify the cost of flights to whatever destination with the quantity of adventure. On a long term trip, budgets are a little more managed, the experience an ongoing one. Every day does however contain a little amazement, sometimes shared with just the three of us, sometimes shared with many more.
