June - Broome to Quondong

Hi,
The purpose of this blog is to keep our friends, family and work colleagues up to date with our travels. PS Photos down the bottom of this blog.
Left Broome on day 52 of our trip (14/6) and headed 45kms north on dirt/corregated roads to Quandong, which is an attractive free camp spot along the coast (on the way to Cape Leveque, just past the Willey Creek Pearl Farm). Dingies can be launched over the beach and camping is on elevated ground overlooking the sandy beach below – so a nice place to chill out and get back to basics after ‘city life’ in Broome. We found a camp with ocean views and plenty of wide open space around us.
Anyway, at Qandong our main past time was looking out for humpback whales as our camp overlooked the whale migration path. However, as the Kimberley region whale season is July to September, we only caught the early bird whales heading north (for mating and calving). So we did see some whales blow and then pop up from the ocean, do a full breech, tail and peck slap - and the sound of a 40 tonne animal smacking back down on the ocean after a breech is amazing. I am told we can expect 35,000 whales to pass through the Kimberley region on an annual basis, so maybe that’s reason enough for us to come back this way in August. When not spotting whales, we went on long beach walks, paddled or surf skis and SUPs, talked to fellow campers, and collected fire wood so that we could sit around the camp fire of an evening. We also did some running and bike riding on the tracks, which wasn’t that much fun, just mainly got covered in red dirt. We also met the aboriginal custodian of the land we were camped on who kindly took us on a walking tour to see some lesser known dinosaur footprints.
So this is our last beach camp and we won’t see the ocean now for a few weeks, and off to the Gibb River Road we go, as we are planning to leave Quandong on day 71 (Sunday 3 July).
Below are also a few photos of our friends we have caught up with on our travels i.e.
. Sam & Mal in Exmouth (who we met in 2003/04 when we were both doing a trip around Oz)
. Steph in Exmouth (who used to work with me at Wesfarmers in Perth)
. Ben in Broome (my boss who travelled from Melbourne to Kununurra via Broome for work)
. Duff from Magnetic Island (who travelled from Townsville to Fitsroy Crossing for work and then came to Broome for R&R to see us)
. Nick from Margaret River (Nic & Lorie own Kimberley Expeditions which run trips from Broome to Darwin) and
. Di from Yallingup (who tries to avoid winter by spending half her time in Yallingup and the rest of the time in Broome).
That’s all for now. PS as you can see, Zappa is also living the dream.
Regards, Karen & Bernie