We got back to Broome yesterday and re-set our camp at the same park as before, my little family had lunch with Amber and Ross before Belinda, the kids and Amber took a camel ride up cable beach. “Ships of the Desert” is one of three camel riding tours here and the camels are an amazing animal. Their hump is actually a fatty deposit they use as food in lean times, much like a crocodiles tail, as is well known they cant go a long time without water, a dehydrated camel can drink 100lt in 10 minutes, they can carry two people easily for eight hours and standing next to them they are an amazingly regal looking animal. Needless to say the kids loved it, so did the two mums.

Our friend Cody, who we met way back in Mataranka turned eleven yesterday so after the camels and my failed attempt at getting a really amazing sunset photo (ruined by the smoke from the still burning bushfire) we went back to have beer and pizza with him and his family, the pizzas were great, the beer was icy cold and it was good fun.

Skipping back in time to before we went to Quandong, all our friends from our travels so far, and Amber and Ross all arrived in Broome within 48hrs of each other, so we’ve been socialising a lot. Room service pizza with Amber & Co at their resort, plus hanging out in the pool started us off, incidentally the pizza at Cable Beach Club Resort have got to be the best I’ve ever eaten in my life. We then BBQ’d at the resort with Darryl & Co, Amber & Co, played table tennis and foosball and had roast kangaroo for dinner, very nice but a bit over cooked. Our next night was spent BBQing at the beach with our road friends and Amber & Ross with some touch footy thrown in. Basically our time in Broome has been spent taking photos, playing beach cricket and Frisbee and swimming in the beautiful water, with cold beer at night. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

One last interesting thing was a trip to the local museum, at $5 an adult it was great and packed with so much info you could stay there all day. We didn’t but we hung about for as long as possible until the kids got bored and I was quite stunned by a really good display and timeline on Broomes pearling history. It’s been running since the mid to late 1800’s originally the Pearl Masters used local Aboriginal skin divers to collect the oysters, the oysters lived about 15m down and a lot of the divers got severely injured, died through all sorts of ways or developed serious lung complaints, when this happened they were rowed ashore and left to die. Obviously the locals didn’t like this treatment and soon refused to dive, un-deterred the Pearl Masters just turned them into slaves and kept going. Thankfully the government eventually intervened and outlawed this practice, that combined with the introduction of the diving suit changed the industry dramatically with an influx of Asians coming to work as divers on the Luggers. WWII changed things dramatically again as all the Japanese divers were taken into custody for the wars duration, after the war it took some time to recover but eventually the Pearl industry got back on it’s feet and at one point there was quite a lot of tension between the Japanese and the Caucasians so all white men were ordered to the police station and made into police constables and told to quell the Asians. Eventually there were riots and the Asian were sent to live in Chinatown. Everything changed again around 1950 when Pearls started to be cultivated on farms and that’s how it is today.

That’s about as brief an update as I could give, we hope to be in Exmouth in a week then to a 700000 acre property for a week or two then continue south, once again I’ll try to update regularly