Friday 24 August – Happy Birthday, Lisa!!  We hope you’ve had a good one.  We have certainly had another lovely day today, which started at a leisurely pace which continued for the majority of the day.

After brekky we set off to see a few more of the sights of Broome, first of all going to find the statue which was unveiled in 2010 as a tribute to the women involved in the pearling – particularly the aboriginal women who, along with children, were the preferred divers for the pearl shell in the early days.  More valued as divers were pregnant women, as apparently the hormonal changes at that time increased the oxygen in their blood, so they could stay underwater for longer periods of time, therefore gather more shell.  I think this is a very beautiful statue of a pregnant aboriginal woman emerging from waves with both arms outstretched in front of her and holding a pearl shell.   

From there we drove a short way and visited firstly the Japanese cemetery, which was most interesting – though with all the inscriptions in Japanese characters, it was a bit hard to know who was actually buried there.  The whole area was white gravel, with various shaped and sized slabs (generally of coloured rock) bearing the inscriptions.  It was extremely neat and orderly, with virtually no shade.

In contrast, the Chinese cemetery next door to it had a most impressive roofed entrance, not a lot of graves, but all facing away from the gate, whereas the Japanese ones all faced the gate, the rows were not at all regular, but there were lots of shady trees and a couple of covered areas also affording shade (I imagine for the funeral goers). And the inscriptions on these were mostly in English.  So they were very different to one another.

By this time it was getting pretty warm again, so we headed seawards, making our way to the westernmost point of the peninsula that Broome is situated on – Gantheaume Point.  This is the site of some 120 million year old dinosaur footprints which can only be seen at low tide, but there has been a plaster caste taken of the prints and it is embedded in the rocks at the top of the cliff.  The formation and colours in the rocks there are beautiful.  It is also the site of the lighthouse,  and a small pool that an early lighthousekeeper had had carved in the rocks so that his arthritic wife could bathe there and ease her pain.  So we walked down the rocks to where that was situated.  From this vantage point you get a full view of the extent of Cable Beach and the stunning blue water stretching what seems to be forever.

It was now close to midday so we called at the supermarket for some rolls and a chicken before coming back to the van for a bit of lunch and a cuppa.  At one o’clock we again were on our way, this time driving 38km to the Willie Creek Pearl farm for the tour which we had booked yesterday.  This road was unsealed for the last 14 km before you got to the creek, and that part of the road was pretty corrugated.  We got there with just a couple of minutes to spare and firstly had a most interesting talk and demo by Luke (a Pom here for another two weeks), then had afternoon tea of tea, coffee, cold drinks and plain and fruit damper before being taken onto a boat and cruising around the pearl racks and seeing a bit of the river and birdlife.  Again a very interesting and enjoyable tour. 

Once again (for about the fourth time) we caught up with the Queensland couple we were parked next to in Darwin.

That tour lasted 2 hours, so it was almost five o’clock when we got back to Broome.  Back at camp we had a text message from Amanda and a phone call from Alan both telling us why we didn’t see the camels last night!  Apparently they were further around to the right from where we were watching, and just round a little bend – near the nudist beach!  Tough luck about that, and there was no chance to go back and have another look tonight as we were going to the Sun Pictures (had bought the tickets yesterday).  So after a cuppa, I made up some chicken rolls (you can take your own food and we went to the 6.30 movie), and we drove into Chinatown and got ourselves a seat in the front row.

Now Sun Pictures is the oldest continually operating open air picture theatre in the world, and you go there for the experience as much as for the movie.  You sit on deckchairs – take your pillows, jackets, insect repellent, food, whatever, find yourselves a seat and enjoy the experience.  And what an experience it is.  Now tonight’s movie was ‘Salmon fishing in Yemen’ and turned out to be quite good.  You are laying back in your deckchair, and while the movie is playing there are geckos crawling on the screen, but there is something even more distracting.  You see Sun Pictures is situated in Chinatown, directly under the flight path of landing planes.  So twice tonight during the movie, planes came in to land,  just over your heads, very low and of course drowning out any sound coming from the film at that time.  It was quite funny.

So there you go – that was our day today.  Tomorrow we up stumps again and head south, with tomorrows destination the Sandfire Roadhouse, about 320 km down the road towards Port Hedland.