Karajini to Broome

Nice to know we haven’t lost our touch. Several days of hot fine weather was making us wonder. But no, we still can do it; it is the wettest everything on record. Except for Perth, which is in drought. We probably should take pity on them and go camping in the south, sort out their water shortage issues for them.


We arrive at Cape Leveque after abandoning a plan to do a loop along the start of the Gibb River Road because the roads are cut. Not just our back country tracks, all the roads. So let’s go instead to Cape Leveque, a celebrated beauty spot, 220 km north of Broome.

We take our chance, because it has been impossible for days now, with the area closed because of a sort-of cyclone hovering around there. Tropical low, they call it, or category 1 cyclone, it doesn’t even have a name, but I have visions of the Rocket being swept up like a farmhouse in Kansas and deposited somewhere inconvenient, like the middle of the Timor Sea. So we have waited, pottering around Broome, eyeing off the weather forecasts to try to decide which way to go to play.

So, flying along a couple of hundred km of, to our surprise, tarred road interspersed with lightly corrugated red dirt, we finish the last much rougher 13 km skating and splashing along ruts and puddles as the rain starts to pelt down again.

We are, not surprisingly, the only campers at Cape Leveque. There are pluses and minuses in everything in life, as Confucius say, and one of the good things about our habit of doing everything in unpopular weather - sweltering hot, bone-crackingly cold, or wet – is that we usually have the places to ourselves. When we did the Camino in Spain in mid-winter, we felt as if we owned the route, and here, at a place so lovely it takes your breath away and makes you exclaim out loud like someone in a B-grade movie, we are alone. A more mundane pleasure , of course, associated with this is having the ablutions block to yourself; now that is special.

We arrive, splash into the reception area, and make our way to our campsite. If the clouds ever part we are perfectly situated for a grandstand view, on a headland looking west, to catch one of the famous sunsets.

Cape Leveque is one of the more successful examples of an Aboriginal community managing its local resource. Here on a peninsula of massive red cliffs framing the western edge of the Buccaneer Archipelago the Kooljaman Resort has a variety of simple accommodation and campsites. Like most of these places resort is a pretty loose term. The scenery, not the wet bar or the invisible edge pool, both of which seem to have been overlooked in the plan, is the lure. There are beaches stretching away forever, although if you decide to swim on the Western side of the headland you will get a quick trip to Indonesia for free.

We set up camp, have a shower and then, as it has stopped raining, we head for the beach on the other side. Three minutes later we are huddled under a little roof over an information board about the lighthouse as the rain pelts down again. Somehow the idea of a swim has lost its charm and we retreat to the warm dry Rocket.

We will certainly come back to everywhere in this area at some later time when it is reliably dry, but we are extremely comfortable and love splashing through stretches of mud and slush on the tracks. Nothing is more fun than slamming the car into four wheel drive and heading into a slippery patch, checking around for winch points in the trees along the road in case it all goes horribly wrong. Of course there aren’t always winch points, sometimes there’s only savannah grass as far as the eye can see, but heck, here we are.

The Kimberleys definitely deserve more than one trip anyway; there is a lot to see and you could play around the desert tracks and the gorges a lot before you got bored. I brought “Kings in Grass Castles”, the history of the Duracks, to read while I was up here; they were a big pioneering extended family who opened up the East Kimberleys. Setting aside all of the native title issues (now that’s a big call) it is a fascinating read, and their mark is all over the map in the names of rivers, hills and even homesteads which are still there. The extraordinary courage of their feats and the hardships they endured is awe-inspiring.

But cast your mind back -first we have to get from Karajini National Park to Broome. Now this was a revelation. We just don’t like tarred roads, they are so boring by comparison. Have I mentioned this before? So we look for a way to get from Karajini to Port Hedland by those enticing little dotted lines. Point towards Marble Bar, off the tar, onto a gravel back road. Lots of these roads service mines, so parts of them are perfectly graded and almost empty. We find one that looks as if it will do. We can go and see . We can always turn around and come back if it deteriorates too much.

It is getting dark and we look for a campsite. It is so remote that we could almost just park on the road, but we look for a pull-off place. One little flat scraped spot beside the road near a river; maybe we should get something with a bit more bare ground in case of snakes. We find one and set up. As we are getting sorted R says, “Who would have thought – there’s a car coming along the road behind us.”

We look in surprise as it flies past. Then another one comes by. We are amazed. Then from the distance comes the unmistakable roar and bright lights of a road train coming towards us. We stare in astonishment as it comes closeer then thunders past. This is followed by one every half hour or so all night. It stops as we pack up just at dawn; it must be shift changeover time at some mine site along that road. So glad we didn’t park close to the edge of the road! One of those road trains might have collected us and taken us to Port Hedland without even noticing us stuck to the side of the bogey.

We set off, feeling lucky to be alive, and the day turns out to be a stunner. I hang out of the window of the car for most of the day snapping photos of the tumbled red rock scenery; hills made of piles of boulders, with ridges running north to south so that the sun perfectly highlights every line, stark black shadows in the folds, wave upon wave of them as we come over another crest. We giggle with delight at the thought of the photos, and I repeatedly call for us to stop to capture something particularly fabulous. It is only later that we find that I should have taken more notice of the message that flashed up, “formatting error”, as not one of them came out. Technology – my specialty.

Marble Bar is one of those names that conjures up thoughts of the exotic, for our generation anyway. We puzzle over it, trying to remember why; maybe it was the place where uranium was first mined? When we get there, it’s even more of a puzzle; there’s nothing exotic about it now, that’s for sure. We need fuel and there’s not a soul stirring except a couple of black teenagers sitting listlessly on the swings in a park.

We will have to get diesel here or stay the night though, so it’s a relief to find a tiny servo. The man behind the counter, a sort of united nations gathered together in one face, seems keen to chat, and we talk about our day. We rave about the scenery we have passed through. “That’s not scenery,” he says, “THAT’s scenery.” He has led us over to the wall where there is a map of the area and he is pointing at a track with lots of turns that we would definitely not have attempted just from the map; the names just sound way too remote and unpredicatble with the weather the way it is: Bamboo Creek Road, Shay Gap Road, Boreline Road.

Hang on a moment. R has just interrupted me. We are in the Rocket at Cape Leveque, the rain is tumbling steadily down, we are having a quiet Scotch before dinner and the iPod player is tossing out some great music. “You know who that is?” says R reverently, “Black Sabbath. And you know what they’re playing? Planet Caravan. “ How appropriate. We both agree that it’s fantastic to be out in the outdoors again, that we’re a bit over houses, way too many walls in them.

So we take that little dotted set of roads out of Marble Bar and it is a very memorable day. The landforms are spectacular, and it is very isolated; we don’t see another vehicle the whole day. It takes this kind of trip to really grasp what a huge country this is, where you can travel all day, several days if it is further into the red centre, and see not a soul.

Despite what the man at Marble Bar had said, we actually preferred the previous day, because the ridges had been perfectly placed for maximum effect . The two days together, though, they are must for a return visit; this was just speed dating and we would like to get to know them a whole lot better. Next time with a camera that is working.

Then we are back to tar, just north of Port Hedland and getting closer to Broome and Zoe and Warwick by the minute. We are back in phone range and Warwick keeps asking Zoe to check our progress. It’s very nice to feel that we are getting so close to seeing them. But the neat tarred  road is so flat and monotonous. Past Sandfire Roadhouse and 300 km to go. R makes Dad jokes about having had a nice snooze at the wheel; the kms tick by. It’s very green, that rare season again, we are seeing something unique.

Then suddenly we are in Broome and there is Zoe, looking fantastic: blooming and beautiful. We head for her house, settle in. Warwick comes home from work and we start a few days of enjoying each other’s company, eating out, looking around Broome.

We go to the outdoor cinema, with the rustle of the palm trees as a background to the story. We have lunch at an organic cafe with a schoolfriend of Zoe’s who lives here with her husband. We breakfast at Town Beach, and have dinners at a Japanese fusion restaurant and a brewery. Broome grows on us; it is neat and pretty and different. When it was rebuilt after a cyclone it was done with sensitivity and a nod to the history. Zoe and Warwick, of course, see the other side of Broome, the challenges, and it makes for interesting conversation about the light and shade.

Then it is time for Warwick to fly to the UK. We wave him off at the airport then head north to Cape Leveque for a couple of days. Here we are, music on the iPod, the sound of the staff here laughing and playing guitars at the bunkhouse nearby, steak on the frying pan. Not bad.