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| Camels, lots of them! |
When I woke up I realised with a start that my little holiday was almost
over and there were lots of things still on my to do list. For a start, though
it was overcast and muggy, I needed to pick up a little something for the man who
was feeding the cat, so I called in at the Court House Market which is held in
front of the former Cable House on Saturdays and Sundays.
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| At the market - I never did find out what a frozen fruit thingy was. Shouldn't have had breakfast first! |
It’s only
a small market but there were pearls and handcrafts on offer, homemade
preserves, honey, liqueurs made from native fruit, a variety of food, some
clothes and coffee. The naturally dyed cotton and silk garments made by an
Aboriginal group were very beautiful but pricey, an indigenous man was carving
the nutlike fruit of the boab and a digeridoo could be heard playing somewhere
in the background. My dog -walking friend from Gaunthaume Point (Helen?), had a stall there and she
introduced me to a couple who were about to move to Tasmania. I tried on some
clothes, tasted some tea made from native hibiscus fruit and only managed to
resist the temptation to have a mango smoothie or a ‘fruit thingy,’ because I
had just had breakfast. I eventually settled on mango colada sauce for the
lovely cat -minding neighbour and then headed off to Cable Beach.
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| Wills, the youngest camel, prepares for boarding |
Have
you ever felt like you were living a cliché? You simply can’t come to Broome
and not have a camel ride, especially as it was precisely the stunning images
of camel trains against the sunset, so emblematic of Broome, which made me
want to come here. They take place on the far side of the rocks and there are
several operators identified by the colour of their blankets. The Blue ones
don’t operate on Sundays and I hadn’t heard about the others, so Red Sun
Camels it was. Though sunset camel riding is the most popular option, it is also
the most expensive, so I took the pre sunset one, thinking that would allow
me to get better pictures of the main event afterwards. I ended up being
eternally grateful that I hadn't signed on for the longer ride, though I can
hardly blame the camels or the operators. Other people seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely.
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| The orange camels make their way back - the weather has greatly improved |
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So how
did the camels get to Broome? Wiki says that in the early days of exploration and settlement,
camels seemed an ideal choice for the hot, sandy and often waterless interior.
Though the first ones were imported from the Canary Islands in 1840, only one
survived and they were subsequently brought mainly from India and the Middle
East, along with approximately 15,000 Afghan and Pakistani cameleers (usually
called ‘Ghans’ whether they were Afghani or not) to tend them. The first major
expedition to use camels was the ill – fated 1860 attempt by Bourke and Wills
in their race to be the first to cross Australia from south to north. [They
succeeded, but died on the way back, but also through no fault of the camels].
After that, camels - mostly the single humped
Dromedaries, were used extensively by pastoralists for heavy work and to cart
supplies and bales of wool. They were also used by merchants to supply the
outlying stations and to build the railways, unaware that they were sowing the
seeds of their own demise. By the 1930's cars and trucks began to replace the
camel herds and they were turned loose in the bush. By 2008, there were over a
million wild camels in inland Australia, more than in any other country in the
world and they were doubling every 8 -10 years, wreaking havoc on fragile
native vegetation, competing for scarce water and threatening pastoral
properties. During the long Millennium drought, many died of thirst and
starvation.
Culls were undertaken despite considerable opposition from the public. Some
wound up as pet food, some became part of the live export trade and were
ironically sold back to the Middle East, and a few ended up on the tables of
gourmet restaurants. Now there are still around 600,000 feral camels of which
about half are in Western Australia. It's likely that the first camels came to
Broome with the pearlers, but camel related tourism didn't really take off
until the 1983 when a man arrived from Darwin with six camels. Red Sun Camels
has been going since 1991.
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| The red camels begin their trek |
The camels kneeling in rows for tourists to board look well cared for and
sanguine enough about their fate. It surely it beats being turned into pet food
or even gourmet steaks. Four year old Wills (as in Bourke and Wills, not the
other one) behind me at the end of the line and the youngest of the pack, lets
out the most heartrending cry - a cross between a bellow and a bleat. He
doesn’t yet have the nose plug by which the camels are “steered.” It looks
painful, but I’m told that it’s no worse than piercings. Tunku, my
appointed camel is also one of the younger ones but I can barely get my thighs
around his back. I also get a bit of a shock when he lurches to his feet and I
see how far it is to the ground.
The camels do a leisurely lap of the beach. It’s only half an hour, but by
that time, my posterior is numb and my back hurts. I can't imagine going thousands
of miles across the desert on one, even with the padded seat. Perhaps it's
because I ruptured a disc a couple of years ago, something I had almost
forgotten about until now. Getting off was the worst. “Just swing your leg over
the handrail” indeed! Though I did eventually manage to get off, I never did go
back to take more pictures. I was too busy nursing my sore butt, but I did ask
one of the girls if ‘cameleer’ had been on her list of preferred career choices
as a child.
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| Red Camels heading back |
The sunset lived up to its promise on this occasion. It comes early here
– 5.45 today, and the times are posted each day at the hostel. Alas, the
equally popular “Staircase to the Moon” phenomenon only works on full moons in
the ‘dry,’ so I have missed out on that for this year. There’s only one more on
the 15
th of October. There was however, one other unique to Broome
experience I wanted to try, so I returned to the hostel until the Picture
Gardens opened at 8.30. In a nice touch the girl I'd met at the cafe the day
before, handed me a pie. "Sorry," she said, "They were two for
the price of one yesterday and I didn't know."
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| The real lightshow begins once the sun slips into the sea |
After taking a taxi back into town because the bus stops at 7.30, I seated
myself in one of the deckchairs at the cinema. I didn’t last long. Nor can tell
you much about the movie, except that it seemed a lot longer than 123 minutes.
There was simply no position in which I could sit or lie without feeling
twinges, but the setting was lovely and at least I had seen the world’s oldest
picture garden in operation.
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| Afterwards the whole sky erupts in a blaze of colour |
Still recuperating, I spent the last morning having a swim, consuming or
giving away my remaining food- you end up with some novel concoctions at this
stage, and reading all the women’s magazines – who got hitched, who got
ditched, who had a baby bump and what they were wearing. It’s a sign of the
times that I have never even heard of most of these people, much less care
about what they are up to, with the possible exception of Princess Mary, who
happens to hail from Hobart. Then it was back to Perth where it was still cold
and raining. I really enjoyed my little break - worlds away from everyday life.
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| Last conscious memory - warm glow of the outdoor cinema at night |
P.S. It's 30oC in Perth today. The warm weather must have followed me down
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