Lazy Days on Cable Beach

27^th - 30^th July

What can I say?  Our last 4 days have gone something like this.  Wake up, breakfast and usual chores, and then load up the car ready for the beach for the day.  Drive the 34 odd km into Broome, stop at the Supermarket and buy a couple of French sticks, cheese and dips, and something for Cameron’s lunch, have a bit of a drive around town to see the sights, then off to the beach. 

At the end of the road, we join the queue of cars waiting to get down onto the beach. For some reason only the local authorities can answer, there is a single lane concrete driveway leading from the end of the road down onto the beach.  Naturally this becomes a bottle neck, and sometimes patience is required with cars trying to negotiate the driveway from both ends.  With something in excess of 2 to 3 hundred cars using this access way each day, you would think the local authority would do something about it, like putting traffic lights up, or widening the road to allow two way traffic, but I guess that’s just a bit too difficult for Aussies to work out.

Never mind, once on the beach we drive along it for about a couple of km, park the car, and that’s us for the day. 

The hard part is having to walk about 200 m to the water when the tide is at its lowest, but we have managed to handle that.   

Cable Beach is about 22km long, and is pretty much the same for its entire length.  Every day we have been there, there have been cars dotted all along it.

Lots are fishermen who drive down close to the water, open the rear door of the car, chuck out the rod, and then pull out a camp chair and a couple of beers and that’s them set up for the day.  Their biggest hassle is having to keep moving their car as the tide moves in or out.

The tidal range here varies from about 2 m to about 10 m.  With the beach being so flat, that means the water travels a long way from high to low tide.  Like I said it’s been a tough life, but we are managing to hang in there.

No day on Cable Beach is complete until you have watched the sunset over the Indian Ocean, so Thursday night we hung around a bit later than usual to enjoy this spectacle.  It was amazing how many extra cars came down on to the beach just before sunset to also take in the sunset.  We weren’t disappointed.  It was beautiful.  Again, one picture is worth a thousand words.

Cable Beach is home to Broome’s well known Camel Train Rides, especially the sunset ride, and each day as we lay suffering on the sand, the camels would come plodding along with tourists clinging to their backs.  Cameron decided we had to do it, but Christel and I weren’t that keen.  Never mind, when in Rome etc, etc.

There are three different camel tour operators working on the beach, the blue, red, and yellow. They keep their camels on scrub land just behind the beach, and bring then down on to the beach each day.  They all offer the same rides, morning, lasting about 40 minutes, afternoon, lasting about 30 minutes, and of course the famous sunset ride lasting about an hour.

We decided 30 minutes would be ample time, as it didn’t look all that exciting to say the least.

What can I say, we handed over our $80, got on the camels, they groaned, farted, snorted and complained, and then stood up.

Then we were off.  Our big mistake was we didn’t bring a book each to read as we plodded up the beach for quarter of an hour and then back again.  The camel attendants did their best to make it interesting by walking beside us telling us the name, personality traits, likes and dislikes, and history of the camel we were riding.  Cameron’s camel was called Harley, so now he can say he has ridden a Harley along Cable Beach, and ours was Matilda.  Did you know there are more wild camels in Australia than there are people?

So there you are - the great camel ride.  Cameron enjoyed it ("So did I!" - says Christel).  Before we had the ride we spent some time talking to one of the attendants. As you do when you are in the company of camels, we got talking about the fact that we had tried Camel jerky, and somehow this lead to whether or not we had eaten kangaroo.  The attendant told us that Coles Supermarket in town sold a lovely marinated kangaroo steak, and we should try it before we left town.

So, Friday night’s dinner was marinated kangaroo steaks.  They were lovely.  Quite a rich flavour but very tender and tasty.  Christel and I had one piece each.  Cameron cleaned up two and was looking for more.  I have a sneaking feeling he thinks he will be able to jump higher now!!

Broome is a very new looking town. A bit like Queenstown or Rotorua, with hundreds of flash motels and accommodation places everywhere.  It is obviously growing at a fast rate with lots of evidence of new subdivisions and new infrastructure being carried out.  It certainly has the feel of being a boom town just starting to boom.  A great place to invest in real estate I would imagine.  We checked out a couple of real estate offices, and found the average 3 bed house was for sale for about 5 to 6 hundred thousand dollars, and 4 bedroom places starting at about 8 hundred thousand and going up.  I would imagine that within 5 years these prices will have more than doubled.

They have got a lovely High School here, just wish I knew a Maths Teacher who would like to live here.  The town has apparently grown around the airport, because it is literally right in the middle of town.  I walked out the doors of one shopping centre we were in, and found I was looking right at the runway of the airport.

So after a very enjoyable 6 days lazing on the beach, tomorrow we must continue our journey south towards Perth.  Unfortunately we will be following the coast for most of the way, so we’ll probably have to check out a few more beaches as we go.  Such is life.