2006/07 Australia trip - Derby and Broome |
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We continued west, joining the Gibb River Road. This is a famous track, an adventure in itself, that crosses the northern parts of the Kimberley from Derby to Kununurra, and takes about a week. Maybe we’ll try that on some future trip. This time we just followed it to the town of Derby, a quiet little place on the King Sound off the Indian Ocean. We were looking for a beach campsite with a laundry and somewhere to do some food shopping: we’d had to cook an ancient can of Spam the previous evening, as supplies were running short.
The beach at Derby looked to be mainly mud and mangroves, and the caravan parks were crowded, so we thought we’d do better in Broome, a couple of hours away. First, though, we visited the “prison tree”, just outside Derby, one of a number in this area, a very large hollow and ancient and contorted boab that was used to hold prisoners on their way to the proper jail. A sign forbids entry inside the tree and then, just in case you are tempted, adds “Snakes are known to inhabit the tree”. Nearby were Myall’s Bore, a well, and a
gigantic concrete cattle trough that was used back in the days when the cattle were driven overland to Derby to be loaded on ships.
We stopped at the visitor centre in Broome to pick up a town map, and Sandie saw a notice board that showed every campground in town as “full”. It was the middle of the Western Australian winter school holidays and also one of the few nights in the year for witnessing the “stairway to the moon” when the moonlight and shadows on Broome’s mudflats looks like a set of stairs. We were told that there was still some space at the Bird Observatory, a long way out of town on a 4wd track, so that’s where we headed at top speed, before someone else got the site.
It turned out that there wasn’t really any space, but the observatory’s warden put us in his overflow-overflow spot at the side of the road, next to the generator. He loaded us up with information on birds and walks. I took a late walk down to the beach on Roebuck Bay. I didn’t see many birds but the beach was beautiful in a way, ringed with red mud cliffs, with a bay full of weirdly eroded rocks and scattered mangrove trees. It was low tide and the sea was way off on the horizon. They have 30 foot tides there, almost as extreme as in the Bay of Fundy.
The day hadn’t warmed up much and the breeze off the ocean was a bit nippy. We were parked by a large set of solar cells that moved to track the sun supply day-time power, but as soon as the sun set the generator kicked in and roared for most of the evening. We still hadn’t got to a shop, so it was curried green beans and rice for dinner.
There was a sign in the toilets: “Please close the lid. The frogs tickle!” It was too late. The frogs were already in! We wondered how to handle this. Should we leave the lid up so the frogs could escape? Or would that encourage more frogs to move in?