20.09.2015 Broome

back to civilization

On the way to Broome, it was a bit difficult to find a legal and free camping site. These places are called 'rest areas' here in Australia. We had to drive over 100 km in the evening to reach the next rest area and ended up eating in the car. Sometimes it's hard to understand Australia... camping is prohibited in so many places, but you're also not supposed to drive tired. How are you supposed to not get tired when you have to drive 300 km to the next camping site because you can't camp anywhere else? On the way to Broome, our GPS decided to leave us and refused to turn on... it kept wanting to select the African language :-D

We were forced to visit a McDonald's in Broome to use their Wi-Fi and download a GPS app on our phone. Since you can only use the Wi-Fi as a customer, we also had to eat something :-D To download the Australia map for the GPS, we only needed 'just' 560 MB ;-)

In our imagination, Broome was supposed to be a huge city, but in the end, it only has 13,000 inhabitants. Broome is definitely beautiful and has two well-known beaches: Cable Beach and Town Beach. However, we had the problem of where to camp. We want to stay in Broome until at least October 3rd, as we are currently waiting for friends we met here and want to continue traveling with. We had three options: 1) Drive to the next presumably illegal camping site, which is 30 km away, every morning and evening. 2) Sleep in a caravan park here, which costs us $35 per day for each of us and is simply damn expensive. 3) Camp illegally on the beach :-D On the first day, we planned to drive the 30 km, but when we spent the whole day at Cable Beach, we saw that there were people camping way back on the beach (7 km). We just moved further back and camped there. We were really afraid of being caught by a ranger and having to pay a fine of $100 per person.. Luckily, everything went well and now we have been camping here every night until today gecampt.Es It's just nice to finally be able to sleep because it's not too hot at night, in the morning you can just jump into the water because you're already there, and you can watch the sunset from bed. What more could you want?

In the next few days, we visited the two shopping centers in Broome and spent the mornings there and had breakfast because it's just too hot outside. After the midday sun, we went to the beach and played rugby and went swimming. Yesterday, we found out that jellyfish season starts in October and that the swimming season is already over... -.- From October to June, the box jellyfish occurs frequently, and its venom can kill up to 200 people. We don't really want to take that risk. There are so-called 'stinger suits' that are supposed to protect against jellyfish. They are probably just neoprene suits.

We plan to go on a snorkeling tour in the Great Barrier Reef, and we will probably get such suits there too. Near the coast, you can see dinosaur footprints, which we also did yesterday. It wasn't that spectacular somehow, and it could actually be quite well faked. In the evening by the campfire, we could observe a lot of little hermit crabs, which was really exciting :-P In the next few days, we plan to visit Town Beach, treat ourselves to a pizza today, and then visit the Malcom Douglas Crocodile Park in the next few days.