Broome

Driving north (some more) we stumbled into a coastal town called Broome. We hadn't planned the timing of our visit, and were just happy to finally see McDonald's, an internet cafe, and civilization. So, we parked, ate some value meals, and went to check our email properly for the first time in a while. But... *music gets tense, with lots of augmented chords* ..as we were using the computers in a gaming shop that overlooked the McDonald's and a nearby park, suddenly a giant dragon, a whale, and an entire parade of vehicles, floats, and dancing schoolchildren came marching down the street, right next to where we had parked our car an hour earlier. Confused, frightened like kitties in a cave, we peeked our heads out to find out it was the annual ``Festival Of The Pearl'', and lo and behold we had arrived on the day of the big pearl parade extravaganza, celebrating the Asian divers and pearling industry which created the city long ago.


The long yellow-green thing is the dragon that was winding through the street.


The whale hovers about, followed by a smaller baby whale float.


A Japanese lady rides a wave trailer. Hundreds of divers died of Hurricanes and Tsunamis in the early years, but their memories are honored by this painted sheet metal wave. Woo.

We simply couldn't have planned our visit better! The parade ended up in the park a block from our car, where they had quickly assembled live music, food booths, some dog-suited man jumping out of a plane, a stage, and a really really bad Elvis impersonator with a thick Aussie accent:


He was so bad it was funny. (Like all Elvis impersonators I guess.)

We took a pearling tour that was pretty interesting. Broome's early industry used to send aborigines and oriental people 200 feet into the ocean to search for giant shells (to make buttons) and the occasional pearl. Because of a lack of knowledge about how the human body worked under water (this was way before SCUBA), the workers didn't generally live longer than a few months. One of the problems: If a person's suit sprung a leak while underwater, their body would be pressurized into the top of their helmet and their whole suit would shoot up to the top of the water and fire up to 10 feet into the air (and their compressed remains would have to be scraped out of it.) There was even a Japanese Diver's Cemetery which contained the graves of Japanese divers who had died of Cyclones, Diver's Paralysis (the bends) and other such watery deaths:

(A few days later we were watching the news in a hostel several cities away, and there was a report about some kids vandalizing the cemetery and breaking many of these tombstones.)

Because so many Asian people had migrated to Broome, much of the city was a weird mix of a tropical palm tree coastal holiday town, and a Chinatown. Information sitting areas were shaped like Japanese temples, and Asian food was everywhere. At the festival they were even waving the Japanese flag along-side the Australian flag. Our last night there we went to a movie that was part of a Japanese Film Festival, showing at the "world's oldest outdoor picture gardens", which was basically an outside movie theater with plants and cloth lawn-chairs. Lizards were crawling around on the bottom of the screen during the first part of the movie. The movie was part of a Japanese Movie Festival, which was a part of the pearl celebration.

All in all, a good couple of days. I dug Broome.