Tuesday 27th May
It felt good to have a 'day off' from travelling ahead of me (I was due to get back on the ER bus the next morning on the Broome-Darwim route), and I spent the morning doing some laundry and food shopping before I took the bus out to Cable Beach to look for some of the guys from the ER bus, and, in particular, to catch up with the crowd that had left Exmouth a few days before me. Broome proved to be a very small place as I kept bumping into people I knew from the ER bus or who I had met during my time in Exmouth. It was also nice to already know people there.
I got out to Cable Beach at 12.30 and caught up with Daniele, the Italian guy I had been hanging out with in Exmouth. I spent a couple of hours chatting with Emer & Sean before they themselves took off on the Greyhound bound for Darwin that evening. After I left them, I spent an hour or two sitting on Cable Beach, watched the sunset and then made a move back to the hostel. On the way back, I met Emer & Sean again on the bus into town and I joined them for a drink while they waited around for their bus to leave.
I got back to the hostel, packed my bags and had a Big Mac Meal for dinner, then went to the cinema to watch the new Indiana Jones movie; it was OK but not great. By this stage, I was happy with my decision to spend less time in Broome than I had originally planned. Broome is held within very high esteem amongst many Australians but, while it is a nice place, I can't understand why it is talked about in such vaulted tones. It is no more remarkable than other places that we had visited in WA, but maybe you need to have a bit of money to make the most of what has become a popular holiday destination, particularly for those Aussies looking for some winter heat.
