The Launch of Picture-A-Day

So it's been a while since we've written, we will write a longer post with more info later on when we find internet/time! Both of which turn out to be quite important if you want to be a blogger.
We bought a new camera while we were in Broome! A nice Canon EOS 600D with a good zoom lens that Angie has fallen in love with. As a result, we will be trying a new thing where we post a picture everyday from our travels! Due to the aforementioned 'internet/time' issue, they will be set up to post automatically though. Little effort; Maximum gains.

This picture is from the first day we got the camera. It was taken at Gantheume Point on Cable Beach in Broome, Western Australia. This location is very close to our hearts because we would drive down to the beach regularly for sunset while we lived in Broome. This lighthouse is functioning and has a huge osprey nest halfway up, very cool but you can't quite see it in the picture. Interesting fact: Osprey are the only bird of prey that carry their fish facing forwards. But I digress. Beautiful sunset, beautiful place.

Still Alive!

In Kalbarri! Many pictures to follow! This particular pic is our lunch stop on the way into Coral Bay a few days ago. Cheers!!!

Pictures Pictures Pictures!

Wow, it is amazing how fast a month can go by! It seems like I was just writing a few days ago, and yet it also seems like forever. We have been pretty busy the last while. When I last wrote I was just in training to become a guide for the tour company and Angie was still working at the hotel.

I have now been guiding for about a month or so and it is great! I have been doing the two day tours we run. The first is up the Dampier Peninsula to Cape Leveque, and the other is to Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek, both about 400km east of Broome.

I have been doing the trip up the peninsula on sundays and the Windjana on on mon, wed and fri. It is really quite a neat job! It is a lot of driving though, but I dont mind too much. The trip to Cape Leveque is just a little bit less then 500km and the other trip a shade over 800km.

The tours have mostly been full busses, meaning 21 passengers on board which is really good for the end of the season. I think it is because of the unseasonably cold winter and spring down south that people are still coming up here. The driving doesnt tire me out so much, it is more meeting so many people every day. That said, I really do like meeting the people.

Some of the things we see on tour are just amazing too. I love the sunsets on the Gibb River Road, and the crocodiles in the tunnel creek cave. All such amazing things. Every day is different too. Each group of people is different, but also the wildlife, weather, ect all makes for an exciting day every time.

On the way back home each night I tend to stop so the pax can take a picture of the truck sitting on the dirt road, and I always seem to end up taking a picture as well. Here are some of the highlights of those pictures for me. Many of the sunsets are taken at the end of the dirt section of the Gibb River Road at approx 17.4424 S 124.3056 E.

Angie has also had a fun time in the past while with work. She was at the hotel doing housekeeping but had the opportunity to go out on a 12 day tour with Kimberley Wild as a host. On the extended tour we have a driver/guide and a host, so she got to go out for a trip around the Kimberley with our friend and fellow guide Brenton. She had an amazing time as one can imagine, and we are both very excited by the prospect of potentially doing this full time together next season. If you are curious about the tours, check out the Kimberley Wild website. They have maps and photos and itineraries of all the tours we do.

We had a very nice night last night down at the beach. A few friends were having a going away party a few kms up the beach. There was a fire, burgers, beer, wine and we all stayed down there until close to midnight sitting in the warm breeze off the Indian Ocean. It was pretty magical.

Anyhow, here are some photos from tours and a little bit about them.

  First solo tour parked for afternoon tea and a swim at the East Beach of Kooljaman

 Truck down at West Beach of Kooljaman getting a view of Cape Leveque

 Truck on the road heading back home down to Broome after a Cape Leveque tour.

 Lunch with a view at One Arm Point Trocus Hatchery. Tide rips through that channel at 11kn!

 Sunset on the way home from Windjana/Tunnel Creek on the side of the Gibb River Road

 A couple of little fresh water crocs out of the water in Tunnel Creek cave.

 Sunset on the Gibb.

 Overcast day on the West Beach of Kooljaman.

 Heading home from the Cape.

 Sunset on the Cape Leveque Road.

 Sunset on the Gibb.

 Almost sunset on the Cape Leveque Road.

 Little bit of mud on the Cape Leveque Track.

 All the things on the other bank are fresh water crocs. 140 or so live in this small pool at Windjana.

 One face of Windjana Gorge.

 Sunset on the Gibb.

 Sunset on the Gibb.

 Pax getting their photos of sunset on the Gibb.

 Truck parked at Windjana. Tiny world hey!

 The world is inside out at the end of Tunnel Creek Cave.

 Sunset on the Gibb.

 Car passing at sunset on the Gibb.

 Trocus shell hatchery at One Arm Point.

 Round Rock Lookout at Ardyaloon.

 Same picture as before, just edited differently!!

 West Beach and Cape Leveque.

 Truck down at West Beach.

 Ruins of Lilimooloora Station with the Napier Range.

 Jandamarra Lives!

 Truck stopped at Windjana.

 Sunset on the Gibb.

 Sunset on the Gibb.

 Sunset on the Gibb.

 Sunset on the Gibb.

Sunset on the Gibb.

I hope you enjoyed these photos. It is amazing to go out and see these things every day. I tend not to take too many photos of the things themselves as I am leading the passengers around, but these are some of the things I see that I just love.

Fire!

Wednesday nights in Broome near town beach, a bunch of people get together to spin fire poi. Some people we know are into it and we went last week to watch. Here are some pictures. I really like how you can see the flames as the poi spin around.

This and That

I have finally found the time to write again!

It is starting to warm up here in Broome. The daytime highs are now in the low to mid thirties, but the forecast has that starting to rise into the mid to high thirties as soon as the next couple of days. It is still a relatively dry heat though. which means it is cool at night and in the morning. It also means that shade still works as the humidity has not kicked in.

Speaking of weather, last weekend we had a freak bit of rain here. Really weird to get rain this time of year in the middle of the dry season, but we will take it when we can get it! It was about two or three days with rain, one where it rained almost all day! It was only about 40-50 mm all told but it was very welcome.

Lots of the country has greened up a fair bit, and everything is looking nice now that the sun has come and dried up the puddles. While it was raining it was a bit crazy though! Walking around chinatown there were up to 8 inches of water over the roads where the crosswalks are...Made it difficult to keep my feet dry!

To talk about something other than the weather, work is going well. I am still waiting to do a first aid course before I can take tours out by myself, but I have been doing plenty of training runs with other guides. It is a lot of fun.

I will be doing day tours to start off with for the rest of this season. Day tours from Broome are long days. They are long days as a passenger, but even longer for the guide. There is an hour or so on each end of the day of packing up and packing down the truck before pickups and after dropoffs.

The short day trip goes up the Dampier Peninsula to the north of Broome and takes in several aboriginal communities, the Sacred Heart church decorated with Mother of Pearl shells, a trocus shell hatchery, the Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm, Kooljaman at Cape Leveque, a nice little swim, and a few more bits and bobs. The trip ends up being about 450 kms all up with the first 90 kms of the road up the peninsula and the last 90 kms on the way down being a brutal unsealed dirt road. It is quite a gnarly section of track and takes some time and a lot of concentration to drive.

The longer day trip goes out east to Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek which are incredible features cutting through the ancient Devonian reef that makes up the Napier Range. The round trip drive on that trip is over 800 kms, with a total of about 200-250 kms on the unsealed Gibb River Road and the Fairfield-Leopold Downs Road. There is a nice break on the way home with a stop for supper at the Willare Bridge Roadhouse on the Fitzroy River.

They are both very interesting trips and it is quite neat to meet all the people, both the passengers and the locals at the stops. There is a lot of very interesting history in the Kimberley region, european, aboriginal, and geological. It is a fascinating and beautiful place with ever changing colors.

Angie is working at the Mercure, the hotel. She is currently in houskeeping, but she is moving over to reception soon, just in time to get inside into the air-con before the build up heat really starts. She was worried she would be just thrown right back into the mix and expected to remember everything from when she did reception last year, but luckily she has just found out that a new computer system will be rolled out for the hotel right when she starts, so she will be trained along with everyone else from the get-go on the new system.

Yesterday I was able to take her along with me on a tour up the peninsula and we were able to go on an optional boat cruise from Cygnet Bay. It is a wickedly fast boat, and we cruised around the islands of the Buccaneer Archipelago. On a spring tide when the tide is running, the 13+ meter tides cause currents through the bottlenecks of the islands of up to 11 knots, the fastest ocean currents in the world.

A few days ago we went down to the beach with some friends and made some yummy fish tacos while the sun went down. It was very nice.

I think I will leave it at that for now!

Broometime

So! Back in Broome. Angie and I are back in Broome, and hopefully back to writing more regularly.

Lots has happened since April when I think we last wrote a decent post. At that point we were in Kalgoorlie just finishing up with working at the assay lab. That is where we did the work that earned us a chance at a second one year working holiday visa. It was not a fun job, but in the end we had met some neat people and while we were not sad to go, we left behind some friends.

From there we felt a pull from the north. We headed out of town on our way to Broome. It was a bit of a rainy day surprisingly, and we were making good progress. For about two and a half hours. Then the radiator of the van went boom...That was disappointing to be sure. Even more disapointing was the cost of a tow back to Kalgoorlie, the nearest place with a tow truck. It was going to be $1100..... We said no way to that and ended up limping into the next little town, only about 30kms up the road.

We got to know Leonora pretty well. It is a little town of about a thousand.... It ended up working out alright. We were only stranded for a few days, all of which we were able to stay in the van and test out our new dual battery and fridge setup, running on solar. We got out of there and had a long few days of driving to Broome. I wont go to much into it, but it was actually quite a nice drive for most of it. Lots of boring stretches, but some really beautiful bits as well.

Rolling into Broome was hot! The past few days had been getting warmer every hour. It was about 45 degrees with high humidity when we arrived, the last dregs of the wet season. Luckily it cooled off and dried out over the next week or two to bearable but still hot. The ocean was over 32 degrees which I have to say is almost too hot to be refreshing.

I walked right back into the job with the tour company I had been doing before, but this time setting up camps for the extended tours. It was a lot of fun, but was stinking hot work. One of the camps, at Cygnet Bay on the Dampier Peninsula is just spectacular. Set on the beach, not another human structure in sight, it is a pretty special place. Angie was working at the hotel again, but I managed to get her out with me a few times, including out to Cygnet Bay.

We were in Broome for about a Month. We left on the 4th of May and flew down to Perth. There we had two cold days enjoying the sights, and just before midnight on the 5th we got on the plane. What would follow was a flight to Sydney overnight, about a five hour flight. We had a couple hours there, then got on the long flight across the Pacific to Los Angeles. That was a long flight, but we landed in the morning and actually felt alright.

We had a heck of a time trying to figure out how to leave the airport terminal. We eventually figured it out and met up with Angie's friend who lives in LA. We had a nice little tour around. We walked up and down Hollywood Boulevard and had a bit of a drive around before heading back to LAX. We got back on the plane again in the late afternoon for the flight up to Seattle. We had a few hours in the beautiful Sea-Tac airport relaxing and having a little nap. We then took the last flight up to Kelowna. We landed just a few mins after midnight on the 7th. That whole time of travelling all the way from Perth to Kelowna had been on May the 6th....It was a long day. Somewhat ironically, and completely coincidentally, on our way to New Zealand the year before we took off on May 5th, and landed on May 7th, completely missing the sixth as we crossed the international date line. Time zones are wierd...

We spent the next month or so up in the Okanagan and on Vancouver Island visiting with Angie and my parents and relatives. It was really nice. Perfect late spring weather, nice and green hills. It was a very nice break. Also amazing to see all the people we had missed over the past year.

Also, we got engaged!!

We were not there for two long though as on the 8th of June we hopped on a plane again, this time headed towards Rome. We were to spend the next five weeks in Europe. Italy, France, Monaco, Germany, Czeck Republic, Austria, Slovenia, and back to Italy. It was amazing.

We met up with a couple of people we knew from Australia and from Canada. One of the highlights for me was going to the Austrian Grand Prix. I am a bit of a Formula One nut and it was amazing to go to a race weekend in person and see the cars and the drivers in action.

We did part of our travelling around Europe by plane and when it came time to get on another plane to head home we were pretty tired of staring at airplane seats. It was nice though as it took us home to relatives and friends again. We had another lovely month or so visiting with family and friends on the island and up in the Okanagan.

August 6th rolled around though after what felt like no time at all, and it was time to start the long trip back down under. It was a bit of a long haul going Kelowna-Vancouver-Los Angeles-Sydney-Perth but we ended up feeling alright when we landed again. I think we have learned how to sleep on planes....

We had supper with Angie's cousins from Kalgoorlie who were in Perth for a few days. That day in Perth was the coldest we had been in since before we left Canada in early 2015. It was 7 degrees and rainy and windy. Anyhow, it was not too much of a hardship to get on the plane for the "short" three hour flight up into the tropics and Broome.

Seeing the red dirt, white sand, turquoise waters and green mangroves which surround the town and then stepping off the plane into about 35 degrees was a nice feeling. It felt a bit like coming home. We went to the staff house where we had our cars, went to the beach, settled back into Broometime.

We had a bit of a lazy and kinda boring week trying to sort out what we are about, but as it stands now Angie is back at Mercure doing housekeeping again and I am working for Kimberley Wild training to be a tour guide. We were hoping that Angie could get on as a tour host, but as the season is winding down there is not really anything for her at the moment.

Anyhow, that is the state of affairs as they stand this morning. I hope to write a lot more frequently from now on. Cheers!

Back Down Under

Exciting times! We are back in the southern hemisphere! Many of you will know what we have been up to the past few months, but here is a brief recap: We went back to broome to work, then back to Canada for a visit. We got engaged, then went to Europe for 5 weeks. We then went back to Canada for another visit and are currently in transit to Broome to start another year in Australia. Exciting times!