Broome 18th-22nd

WA is big and largely empty, this may be a considerable understatement. Many hours had been spent watching the scenery not change and it was odd to be rolling into a town with traffic lights and more than one street. It still felt isolated but isolated with everything you might need for a short time!

We arrived in Broome with more than a little accumulated red dust. So, after lunch by the spectacular Cable beach, more about that later, the main priority was trying to get clean.

Broome developed with the discovery of valuable mother-of-pearl shell and after enslaved Aborigines exhausted that which was easy to reach hard-hat diving became the way forward. Japanese emigrants were particularly good at this but conditions were terrible and many died from the "bends". These days it's not the mother-of-pearl, for with the development of plastics its demand fell, but culturing of pearls for which Broome is known. That and having 22km of pristine sandy beach rated in the top 5 beaches of the world!

I was ready for a quiet few days and easily slipped into the relaxed "Broome-time" culture, lounging on the beach and swimming in the warm sea were high on the agenda. The weather was incredible- every day sunny, high 20s though cooler at nights. Not bad for the middle of winter!

There's not an awful lot to do in Broome but the amazing weather makes it a popular Aussie holiday destination at this time of year when the south is cold. I thought I should do the tourist thing though so briefly visited the tiny town museum and a Pearl-lugger museum and browsed the boutiques selling pearls worth several thousand dollars. One day a few of us got up before dawn and took a taxi to one end of Cable beach, Gantheaume point, here at low tide it's possible to see some dinosaur footprints and after a bit of searching we found them. As the sun came up we walked back along the beach 7kms to where the bus stopped to get back into town. The sand too cold to walk on barefoot at this time in the morning and training racehorses cantering past.

In Broome there's also the oldest, still operational outdoor cinema and catching a couple of films from a deckchair under the stars was a pleasant way to pass some time. As the airport is situated more or less in the centre of town there were a couple of surprising moments when landing planes looked as though they might fly into the screen!

Another Broome "must" is camel riding on the beach. But one camel ride is probably enough for a lifetime and my memory of the discomfort in Egypt was enough to persuade me that simply photographing them silhouetted against the sunset was preferable!