SYDNEY BROOME TRIP 2006
Saturday 29 July to Friday 4 August
Broome
Blog 14 It has been a very busy week. We celebrated Christmas in July with a street party in the caravan park. There was Santa Claus and Mrs Claus and of course Christmas presents, music and dancing. We all had a great night.
We headed down the Cape Leveque Rd with Steve and Leith for 3 days and 2 nights at magic Cape Leveque. The road was much better than Mike and I remembered it from our 2002 trip.
Our first stop was the Beagle Bay Aboriginal Community. The communities on the Dampier Penninsula are quite small and it seemed quite clean. There was a beautiful church which had been built in 1917,which was decorated with beautiful oyster and cowrie shells. The decoration had taken 2 years to complete.
We then took the short cut to Middle Lagoon which is a beautiful isolated fishing spot. The camping ground has showers, water and toilets but no power. The beach was spectacular and each spot is so different even though the distances between them may be small. We spent some time wandering around the beach.
We made our way back to the Broome Cape Leveque Rd and drove the last 70km to Cape Leveque, the last 20km of road was bitumen. A lot of changes in the last 4 years since we have been here.
As we arrived at Cape Leveque or Kooljaman as the local Bardi and Jawa people call it, it was just as breathtakingly beautiful as we remembered it. We drove down onto the beach and then up along the Hunters Creek. There is a resident croc and we were told to be careful but people were still fishing on the sides of the river!!!. We drove through the sand and over the dunes and I think that I am losing my fear of sand driving. I even decided to do some sand driving myself.
The creek was beautiful with its mangroves, different colours of crystal clear water. We got back in time watch the sunset at Western Beach. The red cliffs, white sand and blue water with the evening sun was calming and breathtaking.
The next day we drove across to the other side of the penninsula to One Arm Point or Ardiyooloon, which is a lovely aboriginal community at the top of Dampier Penninsula.
We drove down to the beaches the first of which was Jologo Beach. They have a lot of Trochus shells in this area and we were lucky enough to find a few while wandering along the beach. The beaches are beautiful and the locals still catch turtle and dugong and cook and eat them around shelters that they have built along the beaches. The next beach along was Middle Beach with lots of rocks with rock oysters on them. I have never seen oysters like that.
The community runs a Hatchery with a number of large tanks with a variety of fish, barramundi, tropical clown fish, squid, shell creatures sea anenoemies. We all had a great time looking and playing with the fish.
On our way home we stopped at the Lombadina Community. The lawns were cared for, green and neat. We spent some time wandering along the pristine beach. Each view has its own magic.
