Broome with a view

So I've decided to keep bloggging whenever I travel. This post is about Broome in North-Western Australia where the heat and humidity hit you immediately you get off the plane and walk across the tarmac. A fine layer of sweat and stickiness quickly forms over my body and I know I am definately in the tropics. The flight from Perth to Broome is only 2 and hours but the landscape is extraordinary. A half an hour or so out of Perth and there is nothing but the Great Sandy Desert, hundreds of kilometers of this strange emptiness. I expected desert to be white or yellow but the colors of this desert are a dim reddish grey with scattered bits of green. Sometimes these strange lines appear going west-east which are the remnants of old dunes apparently. It is like nothing I have every seen.

Then the colors of the town hit you. Bright orange soil, the grey green of the vegetation called Pindan, the darker green of the mangroves, the turquoise blue of the Indian Ocean and the hazy blue sky. Just beautiful. Broome is a small town with real frontier feel. This is the land of the Yawuru people who have lived here on the Dampier Peninsula for 27,000 years. and are still closely connected to country. There is also a strong Asian influence due to the Japanese, Chinese and Javanese people who worked here pearl diving There are dusty orange 4WDs everywhere, and most of the buildings are corrugated iron with verandahs to protect you from the intense sun.

We are staying in a lovely resort south of the town, which has lush tropical gardens full of flowering frangipanis and a very inviting pool. It is great to stay in the air conditioned cool of the apartment but I am not here to be comfortable, I am here for South Sea or Broome pearls naturally! After a quick visit to the tourist information office, where I talk to the lovely Justin who is half Chinese and half aboriginal and used to be a pearl diver, I hit the pearl shops.

There is a whole street of them and every one has a different atmosphere. A few are like walking into a sacred temple, full of soft carpets and displays of orchids. Beautiful young women in elegant black dresses wearing the most incredible pearls stalk towards you and you immediately know that you will not be able to afford anything here and that you do not belong! But I find one shop that feels just right and fall in love with a beautiful pearl bracelet. Regretfully I find out the price and have to let go. It is very hard. But then I find this gorgeous tear shape pearl with an exquisite luster and realize I have found the one. The Shop assistant solemnly assures me that the pearl chooses the owner, not the other way round and instinctively I feel she is right. Dazed with happiness I walk out into the heat of the day feeling on top of the world.

But this trip is not all about Pearls, it is also about following in the footsteps of the Movie Bran Nue Dae which was mostly filmed here in Broome. It is a funny sad movie about an aboriginal boy sent off to boarding school in Perth who misses his girl and his home back in Broome. So I am on a mission to find the places – we literally bumped into the first right next to the café where we were going to have breakfast. Sun Pictures, the world’s oldest operating open-air picture gardens is fantastic – a rickety old corrugated iron building full of movie memorabilia. Very atmospheric. The second location is Matso’s brewery which is in a great location overlooking Roebuck bay and has weird and wonderful beers called Monsoon blonde and mango and chili flavoured beer. I learnt later that this is where the interior pub scenes were filmed. I was very disappointed when seeing the Roebuck Hotel, which although atmospheric, did not resemble the pub in the movie at all except for the hotel sign. Apparently the old cottage pictured was used to recreate how the exterior of the pub looked in the 1960’s. That’s movies for you.