Archive for the 'Broome' Category

by Pat
on Apr 15th, 2007

My Week In Broome

G’day!

How’s things? I hope your doing well where ever you are right now (and enjoying the – shock – heat and sunshine in glorious England if you’re there). I’m all good here, which probably won’t surprise you that much :-)

This week has been pretty chilled out, even despite the somewhat hot and humid state out here.

Typical Broome View #1To be fair, the heat and humidity has really aided the chilling out as most of this week I’ve been feeling too lethargic to bother doing anything constructive aside from sitting by pools, sitting on beaches and swimming in pools or the ocean. It’s been such a terrible week. :-)

What’s been pretty cool is that folk from my 9 day tour have been hanging around for much of the week so I’ve always had company to chat to whilst sunning myself or drinking a couple of bevvies of an evening. Alas they’ve all gone now – but Liz and Melissa from my Esperance tour are here still so I’m hanging out with them now! And to think that before I started the Big Adventure I thought I may end up wandering on my own for weeks on end.

The highlight of the week was probably hiring some scooters from the superbly named Broome Broome car/scooter hire place. We did this on Monday and spent all afternoon, evening and the next morning pootling around the place, checking out some tasty beaches and even going for drives along the beach! Fully awesome. Here are the beasts themselves:

Wild Hogs!
Wild Hogs Hit the Beach

Oh yes. There’s at least 50cc between the 4 of them. Still, at a top speed of 65kmph (downhill with a tail wind and no food for a day) they were more than adequate to get around the small town and surrounding roads.

There was a minor mishap when, after trundling along a couple of less, er, tarmac’d roads (i.e. b-u-u-u-u-m-m-m-m-m-p-p-p-p-y-y-y-y-y-y dirt tracks), the mud guard at the front of my scooter came loose and eventually snapped off. Luckily the Broome Broome guys were easy going about it, saying that it was a loose bolt and I shouldn’t have to pay for it. Winner!

The Kimberly KlubAside from that it’s, as I say, mainly been chilling by pools/on beaches… including sitting by a pool in a hostel I wasn’t even staying at (how rude!) ‘cos it was a bit bigger and, well, one of the four of us sitting by it was actually staying there… it’s called the Kimberly Klub by the way. If you’re ever in Broome I recommend staying there as it looked tasty.

I stayed in Cable Beach Backpackers, which was really chilled out and had nice air con’d rooms (you have to request that though!). The only real downer was that it was out of town a bit and the buses aren’t that frequent. Not an issue when you’ve got a Wild Hogs style scooter of course. Oh, speaking of Wild Hogs, check US out at Broome’s open air cinema:

Wild Hogs!
Barney and I looking so cool.

There’s a whole load more photos from my week in Broome at This Here Location.

Right, that’s it then – off to Darwin this afternoon! At some point I’ll kick Squage up the ass to get those blogs about the 5 day and 9 day trips done – there’s lots of cool stuff that happened, so I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait. Probably. :-)

Take care,

Pat

What? What do you mean “What did I see at the open-air cinema?”. Oh, er, nothing. I saw nothing.

Nothing.

Not. A.Thing.

Definitely not something that would go against what I’d said in this post. No.

N.B. Cinema is ruined for me forever. I’m not kidding.

...

by Pat
on Apr 8th, 2007

Happy Easter!

Howdy!

Happy Easter to you! Hope you got lots of eggs / enjoyed mass this morning (delete as appropriate).

Having just finished a wicked 9 day tour of the west coast of Oz (from Perth to Broome) I’m now in an Internet cafe with some of the guys and gals from the tour, checking emails and uploading photos. We really know how to live the dream in a hot, sunny and beautiful place, eh? :-)

Anyways, just a quick one to say I’m alive and well, have done some ace things in the past week (such as snorkeling amongst sharks, manta rays and coral reefs, plus shimmying along rocky ledges five metres above water, abseiling (backwards and forwards…) down cliffs and diving into deep natural pools in the base of impressive gorges) and am definitely looking forward to a week of chilling out on the beach. And in Internet cafes, natch.

Hope all’s well with you. Til’ the inevitable huge blog updates from Squage in a few days – toodles!

Pat