Broome, Western Australia
We visit the Willie Creek Pearl Farms for an excellent tour on the cultured pearl industry, then take a walk to Gantheaume Point to look at old dinosaur footprints.
Well, the morning markets in Broome are rather like most Sunday morning markets in tourist towns: lots of New Age crystals hawkers, paint-your-name-on-a-grain-of-rice artists, and shiatsu masseuses. We'd vaguely hoped that this one would be different, like the Saturday morning market we went to last weekend in Kununurra where we got chutneys and dried mangoes, but it wasn't. Oh well.
At 10:30, we joined a tour at Willie Creek Pearl Farm, out about 20km north of town. This was most excellent: our guide, Mel, brought out all sorts of stuff to show how pearls are made, including two live oysters which she passed around. Basically, pearls are made by implanting little balls of Mississippi mussel shell in the oysters, which are then left alone for two years in the warm inlets and bays up the Kimberley coast north of Broome. After two years, the pearl's removed, and they implant a new one, and back in the water it goes in its special cage. They can grow up to four pearls like this, then they glue plastic bits directly to the inside of the shell, and leave it for eight months or so. The the oyster is split apart, and these pearls (called mabe pearls) are cut from the shell.
I didn't quite realize that Broome is very much the center of the pearl culture industry, either, or that it was developed here. Before the advent of plastic buttons--say, around 1950--pearling was mainly concerned with the shell, which was cut into shirt buttons. Pearls were just a bonus, and quite rare in the wild. The pearling folks here developed a method of implanting them, and hence a new industry was born. Nowdays, large pearls (like the 11 and 13mm pearls I'm holding in the picture to the left) can be readily bought, as long as you have the money. Those that I'm holding are about $10,000 Australian each.
We greatly enjoyed our pearl farm tour. It was well worth it.
On the way back into town, we headed over to Cable Beach to see the resort--pretty tropical, though not quite on the beach. We then headed down to the southern tip of the peninsula that Broome sits on--Gantheaume Point. At very low tides, various dinosaur footprints are exposed in the stone. Unfortunately for us, we're in a period of neap tides, so the footprints were under 6 to 8 meters of water! They have some casts of the footprints on top, though, and you can stick your foot next to them. They're big!
Gantheaume Point is also very pretty, with azure blue seas and deep red rocks making it hard to look out to sea!
After that, we just spend the afternoon reading and relaxing, and enjoying a yummy dinner: the Old El Paso Gordita Kit. While there is something a little odd about it--I've never seen Mexcians sprinkle crushed peanuts over their gorditas--it wasn't that odd: I've never seen Mexicans really eat a Gordita. I suspect it's a Taco Bell invented food, like nachos and fajitas.
Weird Wildlife Sighting
Interesting wildflowers!