Last Day in Broome

 Our holiday is coming to an end and we fly back to Sydney tomorrow, via Perth,  so it will be a long day.

Today is a free day, and after our excellent tour yesterday afternoon, we are not sure what else there is to see in Broome. So we opt to buy a day ticket on the explorer bus ( hop on hop off), which covers a range of stops around Broome at half hour intervals. We should have been suspicious when the first bus arrived a bit late. It didn’t get better from there, with bus breakdowns and air conditioning failures, the half hour schedule blew out to an hour leaving people stranded at bus stops all over Broome. There office sent all phone calls to a mail box obviously not wanting to confront angry customers.

Nevertheless, we stopped in Chinatown, and spent around an hour there walking around to see it in more detail.



 
There wasn’t a lot more to see, lots of shops, banks, a few pubs and lots of pearl shops and jewellers.



This pub is huge and almost occupies a whole street block


After a long wait at the bus stop, our bus eventually arrives and we move on to Cable Beach.


There were quite a few people on the beach


Many of them arriving by car



Maybe not a great place to swim though

We had a drink at the Cable Beach Hotel, before heading back to the bus stop for another long wait. We decided to stay on the bus and get off back at Chinatown for lunch. Yesterday we saw a restaurant called Mr Saigon was very busy, so we assumed that the food and service there must be good. We settled in there and ordered some Vietnamese Food for lunch. An hour later, my dish arrived, and 10 minutes later Carole’s spicy beef salad arrived. The only problem was that the beef was chicken, we were too hungry to argue too much as they claimed that’s what we ordered. Waiting another hour wasn’t a good option.


I gave them an appropriate assessment on TripAdvisor.

By now we were ready to give up and go back to our hotel and relax. The bus was an hour late, but we did get back to our hotel.

Tonight we decided to have an easy meal. There is a pizza place across the road and a bottle shop, we should be able to get something to meet our needs. I ordered the pizza to pick up and wandered across the road to get it at 6.20pm. To my dismay, the Liquorland closed at 6pm !

We brought a bottle of red from our hotel bar and sat in our room enjoying our pizza and watching the Olympics.

Our pick up in the morning to take us to the airport is at the civilised hour of 9 am


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Vansittart Bay and Jar Island

Image
  We anchored in Vansittart bay at around 6 am, only to see our Ponant mates anchored on the other side of the bay. Two zodiac tours are planned for today, one to see a plane wreck on one side of the bay, and the other to see some aboriginal cave paintings on the other side, where Ponant is currently anchored. Apparently the plan is for the ships to change anchorages at around 12.30 pm. We are doing the plane wreck in the morning and they will do it in the afternoon. It is a beach landing in the zodiacs at both sites and this morning they have got out the big zodiacs. They hold 12-14 people and have 90HP outboards, and really get along.  Morning wind and sea conditions are good so the zodiac to the beach is uneventful. When the first groups arrived on the beach they saw a 3 m crocodile cruising backwards and forwards just off the beach. We were all told to keep 3 m from the waterline if we wander along the beach. A briefing was held on the beach to explain what we were going t...
Read more

Koolama Bay / King George River

Image
 Today is our first day venturing out in the zodiacs into some of the more remote areas of the Kimberley. The plan is to go up the King George River to the King George Falls, quite a trip, about 3 hours return. Conditions are not perfect with a 24 knot breeze blowing against us, but fortunately is is an outgoing neap tide, so the wind waves could have been a lot worse if it was wind against tide. Zodiacs travelled past our balcony as they were offloaded from deck 9 Nevertheless it is a very wet ride across Koolama Bay until we reach the entrance to the river. The zodiacs are large and hold 8 people plus driver with a 60 HP outboard, so have plenty of speed on flat water, but on the choppy conditions we set out in, it is slow and wet progress.   Departure is in groups and our departure time was 10 am, returning at 1 pm. Until we reach the river mouth, the travel across the bay is very bumpy. A lone yacht is running with the wind out of the bay as we head towards the river entra...
Read more

El Questro

Image
 A very long day is ahead of us with our bus departing Wyndham port at 7 am and an expectation that that we will be back on board at 5.30pm. Docking at Wyndham took place at 6am, and there is nothing here. The township is at 3 mile (the distance from the port), home to a population of around 900 of which 70% are indigenous. The port now only exists to facilitate live cattle exports. The bus trip to El Questro Station takes about 2 hours, leaving Wyndham on the  Great Northern Highway towards Kununurra, the turning off onto the Gibb River Road (this section is paved), and then the last 16 km into the Station is heavily corrugated dirt road. Leading up to the Gibb River turnoff, the Cockburn ranges dominate the landscape. We pull over at a lookout to get a photo of the ranges along with a number of tourists in 4WD’s. Cockburn Range Stretching our legs at the Cockburn Range Lookout A shredded spare tyre We continue along the Gibb River road towards El Questro with some great land...
Read more