Monday 17th June 2013 – Broome

Went for a pre breakfast walk at Ganthaume Point.  Located Anastasia’s Pool built by Patrick Percy for his arthritic wife who bought the old lighthouse in 1922.  Also checked out the routes down to the dinosaur footprints (where we would see them if we had have been here at a very low tide).  The dinosaur prints date back 135 million years.  Shame we can only see the cast today.

Coffee and cake in China Town followed by a visit to the historical museum in the old Customs House.  This is a fascinating place full of displays of Broome memorabilia – pearling, the bombing during WW II and the history of the town. It’s very well done.

At 11 it was time to head to Willie Creek Pearl Farm for a tour of the pearl facilities.  Daniel taught us all about the silver or gold lipped pearl oyster (Pinctada maxima) – their anatomy and how they are farmed.  An oyster can be seeded up to 4 times with a larger pearl being produced each time.  Lunch followed – fish and salad and gluten free fruit damper.  After lunch we were on a boat to have a look at how the oysters are managed – how they’re attached to lines cleaned etc.  It concluded with a visit to their shop and an explanation of why some pearls are worth thousands of dollars compared to others which are much more reasonably priced.  One string of pearls on display was valued at $95,000.  Was also interesting to see why freshwater pearls (mainly imported from China and India) are so much cheaper.  While a salt water pearl is produced one at a time a freshwater oyster can produce up to 50 at a time.  It was a most interesting day and was nice that there was no pressure to buy.

Back to Broome and the supermarket to stock up for the next few weeks.  Apart from Derby we will not be seeing another supermarket until Kununurra (three to four weeks away).  That’s what we assume at any rate in reality some of the station stays might have quite good stores.

We thought we better do the drive on Cable Beach to watch the sunset (a must do in Broome????)  so off we went with hundreds of others to drive along the beach and watch the sunset.  The sunset itself was nowhere near as spectacular as the other night but it was pretty cute having all the camels walk past.

Dinner tonight was in the garden at the Mercure – barbecue chicken (from Woolies), salad etc.

Tomorrow we leave civilisation for a while and head to Cape Leveque.