Broome

As soon as we drove in to Broome it felt like a holiday resort, and we figured out that even though it has the same weather as everywhere else we've been in the last few months, the difference is that Broome has palm trees - obviously a sure subliminal signal of 'tropical holiday'. Home of the famous Cable Beach, Broome is very much a tourist town. See the photo below for miles of golden sand, with all the bathers huddled between the flags outside the lifesaving club, except for the ones at the nudey part of the beach a discreet few hundred metres away. Mind you, when we compare it with our memories of Brighton Beach in England - deckchairs on every square inch of pebbled foreshore - we appreciate what we've got here in Australia. Not being much into bathing, we confined our Cable Beach activity to a relaxed lunch in a foreshore cafe.

Before it was a hedonistic tourist trap, Broome was a bustling pearling port, and it is still the hub of a large pearling business. While in the past the main product wasn't the pearls themselves but the mother of pearl shell, in this day of plastic buttons the industry concentrates on seeding pearl oysters to produce beautiful jewellery pearls. We did a very interesting tour to a pearl farm (see photos above), where they showed us the massive oysters used (if you look closely you can see the crab that was living inside this one before its home was wrenched in half), the seeding process and examples of the finished product. Unfortunately they counted them before passing them around for us to look at, no slipping one into your pocket!

We also did a day trip North to a small aboriginal settlement called Beagle Bay. Here there is a beautiful church with an altar made from mother of pearl shell, wouldn't be surprised if it is one of the most photographed church in Australia.

There's quite a good golf club here in Broome, and quite by chance we found that the Broome Open was on while we were here. While neither of us played very well, and didn't collect any prizes, we had fun, met some of the locals, and got 2 rounds of golf for the $40 entry fee versus $37 for the usual green fees, so it was pretty good value! We won't be seeing grass greens again for a while on our journey south, so we took advantage here and had another round as well, before we go cold turkey for a while.