Beautiful Broome

We were in a 7.30 am flight out of Perth to Broome a mere 2 and a bit hours away. The Virgin flight was an A320 and it was pretty full.

First impressions of Broome: is nice and warm but not hot or humid, it is very green, there are lots of 4 wheel drives and caravans, and it is a very relaxed town. The houses are interesting with many of them having walls of corrugated iron and no gutters on their roofs - this is a cyclone prone area. The central business district of the town is called Chinatown as there were a lot of Chinese here working in the pearling industry many years ago. The airport is located just next to Chinatown so there is a steady stream of planes flying overhead to various locations and helicopters taking workers to the offshore rigs.

Pop and I did a wander around town and then did the Jetty to Jetty self guided walking tour. The bus service was pretty easy to work out they just did a loop around town and ran every half an hour or so.

Early Broome was very much based on the pearling industry and there are many big pearl shops and galleries in town. In World War 2 it was attacked 4 times by the Japanese mainly because it has a large sheltered bay, called Roebuck Bay, which is ideal for landing flying boats that were evacuating people from Indonesia ahead of the Japanese advance. Now it still has a pearling industry but also has lots of tourists.

Thanks to the shape of the continental shelf off the coast the tidal movements here are huge, the 7th largest in the world, so wharves have to be very big and long to get out to deep enough water.

The famous Cable Beach was the place to be to watch the sun go down over the Indian Ocean, along with a few hundred others ... and some camels!Read more