Rowkin Rovings Blog

Our last day in Frog Hollow involved an early morning trip to Warmun to look for Di’s sunglasses which she had lost the previous evening at the jumba. Alas, nothing was to be found so first course of action on arrival to Perth on Wednesday will be to order some new prescription glasses. What a bugger.

The weather forecast said that Kununurra was going to reach 42c so that meant it would be hotter out this way, so Di just opted out on the trip to the Winnipa Springs a local waterhole about an hour away.

It was quite special as it is only known to the local aboriginal mob so tourists and white fellas don’t get to go there. Rule is that you need to be blessed before swimming by one of the local Warmun Aboriginal community.

Amanda’s plan was to find a local kid that is allowed to do the blessing. This meant driving back to Warmun and driving around town to select an appropriate kid. We found one and he had 4 mates that wanted to come along. No problem, we all piled in and off we went.

Trip out was enjoyable with the 5 youngsters having a ball in the back ( with their seatbelts on most of the time).

Arrived at the waterhole, completed the blessing and had a great afternoon swimming in a fantastically cool beautiful and remote part of the East Kimberly.

The sign below isn’t about showing the distances so much but the Port Hedland destination.

This is where we met as a couple 35 years ago. Fraser was a grade controller for Goldsworthy Mining Limited and living at Shay Gap. Di was working in Port Hedland as a nurse. So folks, this is where it all began and in some ways it feels like we have come back to our beginnings. Some of what we experienced in the last week was not new to us but we can see some good advances have been made in the last 35 years.

28th October

Well it was an early start this morning – 5.30am, ugh. We had a 250 kilometre trip from Frog Hollow back to Kununurra for our flight to Broome leaving at 11.00am.

We have discovered how much you can achieve when you get up early in the morning this last week. Hmmm, not sure we will be able to sustain that habit though?!

Amanda very kindly took us to the airport and then turned around and headed back to Frog Hollow to do her reports. Travelling such distances here is just all part of it. Nobody bats an eye at it.

The flight to Broome was only and hour west of Kununurra. We use to go to Broome back in the early 1980’s when we lived up in the Pilbara region and back then it was a very sleepy old pearling town. Will go further into the history of Broome over the next few days.

We have heard it has turned into a tourist location and has been substantially developed over the last number of years. Maybe for the better, maybe not.

The flight was only an hour and got into Broome at 12 midday and headed out to our accommodation at Cable Beach. Our luck was in and we got ungraded to a one bedroom apartment with all the necessities including a washing machine and half drawer dish washer – we hit pay dirt. We are only paying $106 a night for this place and we also get a $10 voucher for a latte each in the morning. Cant beat that! In the height of tourist season, which is in the winter months of June to September, there is no way we could afford to stay in a place like this.

We caught the local bus to the shopping centre and stocked the larder up for the next day and then crawled into the resort pool to cool off.

The resort is empty because we are going into the wet season but it is 32c here with gorgeous clear skies with a bit of humidity. After cooling off we walked down to the beach to watch the spectacular sunset and see what else was happening.

We thought out shadows made for an interesting image along with the camel train.

There are about 750,000 roaming wild in the outback and they cause a host of problems. Camels were imported to Australia in the 1840’s from Arabia, India and Afghanistan for transport and heavy work in the outback.

We wandered along the beach for a good hour looking at the abundance of small crabs doing their thing and waiting for the sun to go down. The water was so incredibly warm.

As beautiful as it is, there are nasties in the water and especially starting now. There are several kinds of box jellyfish. Only two of them are dangerous, and both can be found along the beaches of Broome. The worse time for the jellyfish is in the wet season that starts in November -oops, bad timing on our behalf.

Can’t get much more beautiful sunset.

We stopped in at a bar and had this view whilst we supped on our drinks.