Pindan Land

Other adventures around Broome included a trip up North to Cape Leveque, with its' white sand beaches, turquoise sea and red rock cliffs. 5 people, from 5 different countries (England, Germany, New Zealand, China (Hong Kong) and South Korea if you're interested) in one automatic 4WD (seriously, what's the point of an automatic 4WD?? You lose so much control when you have an automatic car!). Muggins here was the only one over 26 and with a valid driving license and therefore allowed to drive off sealed roads in the hire car, so I got to drive. Which of course lead to arguments as I thought that someone else should take on the task of navigating, but a general lack of road signs, and lack of attention on behalf of all the passengers (and possibly the lack of an insane father - who taught me how to read maps properly) meant that no navigation got done, we got lost, and the driver got ratty. Fortunately we had brought a decent supply of junk food with us (in fact more junk food than real food....) and sugar calms all wrongs, or so it seemed. Or it may have been the beautiful sunset over middle lagoon where the tide had gone out quickly leaving wet reflective sand, just down the dune from our secluded campsite, ripe for many silly photos and running around barefoot. And then trying to work out where we'd left our flip flops, and more importantly, where we'd left the path to the campsite and car....

The first night we got very damp as condensation fell over the tents. We charred food in the fire, and eventually gave up and cooked the rest on a gas stove. Much alcohol was drunk, resulting in a display of Korean disco dancing... “sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry...” I'm not sure if that was the song, or just a warning for what was to come, but no matter how drunk we got him he never did repeat that display! The next day we headed up to Cape Leveque (along more red sand roads), after New Zealand insisting we all take many papparazi style shots of him...

We went snorkelling at Cape Leveque, watching the fish dart among the rocks in the sand below us. Only after about 20 minutes did I realise that the sea was so salty that I wasn't swimming so much as floating and solely moving my limbs to change the direction that I was looking in! We wastched the sunset, and got a very confused solo tourist to take group photos of us, before heading along towards One Arm Point to camp for the night. Here we caught the end of the sunset as we watched the sharks feeding off the remains left by fishermen on the rocks as the tide came in.

The next day we headed to the turtle hatchery at One Arm Point Aboriginal Community, where we saw sea turtles, but unfortunately didn't see any babies, then it was a pretty fast drive back down to Broome to get the car back in time to remove all the pindan (red dirt) that had eked its' way into every crevice (of both the car and us!)