So it’s become apparent that we’ve undertaken a bit of a task with this drive to Broome. Everyone we mentioned it to at Nannup looked at us as if they thought we had gone completely mad… usually the conversation goes something like this:
Random person - “so, where are you off to next”
Hussy – “We’re driving up north to play some shows in Broome”
Random person – “Oh, wow, that’s a long drive. When are your shows?”
Hussy – “Wednesday”
Random person – “Oh well, at least you’ll have a week and a half to enjoy the trip”
Hussy – “Er, no, Wednesday as in 3 days away”
This is always followed by a look of disbelief and a head shake… this is the reason I think we may have bitten off more than we can chew. Hmnmmm…
So we start the drive at midnight after we finish playing our last gig of the festival hoping the south west’s kangaroo population will make themselves scarce for the late drive. The post gig euphoria lasts for a good 100km or so before exhaustion sets in and so we pull into a rest area to get a few hours sleep, planning to wake at sunrise to get in a full days driving. We didn’t do too badly considering the huge weekend we’d had, only pushing the snooze button on the alarm twice before actually getting out of the horizontal position and into the drivers seat. As I’m a better morning person than my co-pilot I did the first stint and luckily it wasn’t too far to the nearest servo for a strong coffee to help with the wake up. We had to stop into Perth to pick up our cowboy friend and though we were a couple of hours later than our rather optimistic planned time we still got on the road by about 9:30am.
Driving long distances is a really quick way to get to know each other and so we all jibbered on for a bit, Julz and I alternated driving with sleeping (Zeph opting out of the driving due to an unfortunate absence of a licence) coming up with the kind of conversational topics that only arise when you’re facing a two and half thousand kilometre drive in 2 days. It’s actually quite amazing how many things there are to talk about, obviously with Zeph being a fully fledged cowboy he became an authority on all things country and we plied him with questions like “Do cows get sad when other cows get killed?” and “Would a crow eat another crow if it was roadkill?” and “Are the camels up north one or two hump camels?” and a whole host of other useless questions. I also decided I really wanted to see a camel and pointed at every ant mound screetching “Camel?” excitedly. We passed though a station that Zeph used to work on and he told us the property covered one million acres and we tried to get our heads around how much land that was. We drove through that property for 120kms which gave us some idea of the vastness. We stopped at the dots on the map to fill up with $1.77 per litre fuel and at one of the ‘dots’ got chatting to the roadhouse attendant about life in the town with a population of 11. She told us the story of the local transsexual who at one time used to be a male goat farmer. It’s almost impossible to imagine how one would go changing gender in a town like that… apparently she wasn’t too fond of the town people either and put a curse on them all in a ceremony on top of a pile of rocks near the roadhouse. Unfortunately we didn’t get to meet her in our brief stay at the town but most of the population was in the roadhouse escaping the heat with a couple of tinnies at the bar so we feel we got a good handle on the place. Back to the tranny though (as you can imagine she became a popular topic of conversation in the van), we reckon in a town of 11 there’s a maximum 6-7 guys (most of whom were at the bar) and we’re not sure, don’t get us wrong we know that WA is progressive, but we reckon the ratio of county Aussie blokes who get into a bit of tranny lovin probably still hovers a little over the 6:1 mark. So we’re wondering how she gets along at the local dance.
We also passed through a little town which had a very odd but elaborate lighting system rigged up over what we could only imagine was once a bowling green. Or a turf farm… or perhaps some kind of whacky hydro set up, but I do like the idea of a thriving little community getting out and playing midnight lawn bowls once a week.
Anyway, I’m rambling… you can see what those thousands of kilometres has done to me! But let’s cut a long drive short and give you a quick brief of the high and low lights in point form.
- A few k’s past Newman we saw a sign to the Eagle Rock falls and decided we could use a swim so pulled onto a dirt track (and I hope Traveller’s Autobarn aren’t reading this!) thinking a couple of hundred metres of dirt road wouldn’t hurt… 45 minutes later, after a good 40 minutes of procrastinating over whether to turn around or not, and we got to a sign saying Eagle Rock Falls 34km. So we aborted the mission and decided that on the map it looked like the dirt road we were on linked up with the highway just a few k’s down the way. Another half hour and we were starting to get a little concerned. We found a road that looked like it led back to the highway but instead it took us to a weird tunnel under a mountain that must’ve been a mine at some stage. Or perhaps it was the Wolfe Creek murderer’s lair. Hmmm. We kept driving (very slowly and carefully, I promise) and got to a little mining settlement where we ignored the signs that warned us to keep out except in emergency (well, it was almost an emergency… I was really starting to get cranky!) and a nice mining chap told us we had to take the next left and we’d be back on the main road in a jiffy. Whew.
- Our trusty map book told me that there were some aboriginal rock carvings at a rest stop so we decided to make it our designated lunch point. Unfortunately we couldn’t find any trace of rock carvings and instead of the nice picnic we’d planned we ended up being more than a little irritated when we realised our destination was in fact a fly festival and we were swarmed with the little black critters who were dead keen to get into every orifice and on every scrap of food. Then, when hopping out of the van quickly to minimise the fly colony inside I twisted my ankle quite badly and we ended up chomping down a sweaty and teary feed in the back of the van with the army of flies buzzing at the windows.
- The 100 and something k’s we did out of Port Hedland in the early evening where we spotted 6 brown snakes on the road – I think we only ran over 2.
- The distinct lack of kangaroos on the road, we only saw one group of about 3 or 4 roos and it was in broad daylight. Woo hoo.
- Zeph came up with a challenge to find all 16 towns in Oz that end in “atta” – I did really badly at that one… Coolangatta, Wangaratta, Parramatta, Cabramatta… hmmmm that’s all I got.
- And the biggest highlight of all – arriving in Broome and realising that it wasn’t as big a mission as everybody said it would be! Yee Har.
We got in much earlier than we expected and Broome has really put on some amazing weather for our arrival. We’re staying (and playing) at the Mangrove Resort and the view from our bar is absolutely breathtaking. There’s no use trying to describe it because I couldn’t do it justice, but I’ll put up a photo so you can see for yourself.
We played a lovely little gig at Mangroves in the evening as we watched a storm come in over the bay and sipped on glasses of wine. It’s a hard knock life for us
More on Broome soon.
