On to Derby

After spending the last 9 days in relative luxury we head for Derby which is 220 K’s by road from Broome. After leaving the Gt Northern Hwy and passing the Curtin RAAF airbase, we arrive at Derby. Derby is what I would call a typical Kimberley town – very little movement in the heat of the day and appears quite deserted to the untrained eye.

We stayed at the Kimberley Entrance Caravan Park for 3 days as we want to be able to see our beloved West Coast Eagles battle for the Semi Final on Friday night. Unfortunately they lose to Collingwood by 19 points and it’s the end of the footy season for us.

There’s not a great deal to do in Derby, and we found it to be a drab, uninspiring town. However, it presented us an opportunity to do some fishing which we haven’t had much of a chance to do on this trip. There is a circular shaped jetty used for loading shipping and one of Derby’s claim to fame is that it has the second largest tidal range in the Southern Hemisphere. While we were there, there was almost an 8 metre difference between high and low tide. It is also quite hot here. On the days we were here, the temperatures were in the mid to high 30’s and if not for the air conditioner in the van, would have found it hard to take. For those of you who live in Perth, imagine a typical summer heat wave - that happens here all year round! We were able to stock up on our supplies as the shopping is quite good here despite only having only having Woolworth’s and IGA supermarkets.

One thing we have discovered since entering the Kimberleys, is that the liquor sales restrictions have altered how we buy liquor. Because of the alcoholism problems with some sections of the Aboriginal population, you cannot buy any more than 2 litres of cask wine and those sales are restricted to 1 cask per person per day. Our favourite cask drop comes in a 4 litre cask and realise that we will probably not be able to buy it until we get to Darwin, and maybe not even there. We became aware of this when entering Broome and realise this will probably be the case until we leave WA. Having mentioned this, we will be stopping at 2 notorious places in the Kimberleys on the way through – Fitzroy Crossing and Hall’s Creek. It will be interesting to see if things are as bad as the media in Perth have depicted it.