Day 123 - Monday 6th May 2024
This morning was an early one again, which was a good thing as I had a pickup at 06:35 for the day's excursion; the one day Dampier peninsula excursion.
Yesterday I'd received the warning that the sea safari part of the trip (the bit that I'd booked the whole trip for) possibly wasn't going to happen due to lack of numbers, but when I boarded the bus the sea safari was something that the driver/guide was expecting to happen.
So, we set off out of Broome, and took a left turn onto the Dampier peninsula road. It was a bit of a mystery tour for me as I couldn't remember much about it past the sea safari bit. An hour and a quarter up the road, we pulled into the settlement of Beagle Bay. The settlement had toilet facilities, a picnic area and a church, and was going to be the site for morning tea and cakes. Asked whether I was going to go and explore the church, my answer was no .... I'm not a churchy person at all.
After tea and cake, we left Beagle Bay and travelled another hour up the road to Cygnet Bay; this is the site of a pearling operation, and we had a really good and informative tour here. We were given an overview of the history of the place and the person who set it up. Pearl seeding had been developed by the Japanese and was a closely guarded secret. The owner of the site decided that he'd like to get in on the action, so he contacted his son who was a marine biologist studying in Perth.
He returned north, and over the course of then next two or three years figured out how to seed pearls in the native oyster, and so the Cygnet Bay pearl farm was born. The native Australian oysters are larger than the Japanese varieties, so the thinking was that they should be able to produce larger pearls ..... this proved to be true as the largest pearl in the world was one of their products.
We then moved on to an explanation of how the pearl is seeded. A small orb is inserted into an organ called the Gonad (no, I didn't ask but wish I had!) along with a sliver of tissue that develops Mother of Pearl in the shells. That tissue allows the orb to be coated with the mother of pearl so that it doesn't irritate the oyster, and voila ... a pearl is developed over the course of two years. We witnessed the harvesting of a pearl from an oyster, then moved on to an explanation of how pearls are graded and valued. The pearl we'd seen extracted was valued at $272 Australian.
We had lunch at the restaurant on site, and then back to the bus where we had some bad news. My Sea Safari was in fact cancelled, and also a couple who were supposed to be flying back to Broome had news of their cancellation as well. Usually the rest of the tour move on to another site before returning to pick up the sea safari guys, but today I joined them as we continued onto the top of the Dampier peninsula and the settlement of Ardyaloon.
We had a stop off at Roundrock Lookout for a view of the racing tide (they have the second largest tidal range in the world here), and the currents looked strong ..... which made missing exploring them on the sea safari worse .... a 'here's what you could have won' moment. We then moved on to tour a Hatchery. Well, it wasn't really a hatchery any more. It had been, but when the study had completed the facilities were left for the local community, and it was like a cheap aquarium. Not impressive at all, and it felt like something added to fill the space that would usually be there before going back to pick up the sea safari guys.
We started to head back towards Broom, but had one more stop at the settlement of Lombardina; another aboriginal settlement that had been a Roman Catholic mission. We were taken around the village by a local to see where the dormitories had been, the dining room, the church and for some reason the bakery. I really don't see the point of us visiting this beyond giving the locals an income from tourism.
Back onto the road once more, and the two hour drive back down to Broome; the quick calculations on the bus suggested that we'd done 500km today by the time I was returned to resort at 17:00 .... a long day in time as well as distance. I dropped my bag in the room, then ventured out for dinner at a nearby brewery. On the way back I had a slightly surreal moment as I was passed by a string of camels returning from the nightly sunset camel rides on Cable Beach .... just the one beer with dinner!
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