A site of significant importance to the local aboriginal people, Cape Leveque is a place of seemingly staggering beauty. Bright red cliffs fringed with white sand and an azure blue sea combine to make this location one of the most stunning natural sights you’ll ever see.

Cape Leveque has been on our must see list since we started planning our Big Lap of Australia. It is very remote and accessible only by 4WD vehicles or aircraft, which means it is off the day-trippers list, for now, and the beach remains crowd free. It is, however, possible to camp here or ‘Glamp’ for those in need of more creature comforts, and the reward is the evening sun setting on the cliffs causing them to glow even more than our early afternoon visit.

This is definitely a place to return to in the future. Sadly our time here was limited giving time only for a few photographs before heading further south this time on a larger 4WD bus to take in some additional passengers.

It would be the perfect spot for an aerial photograph but yet again there was an airfield within 5.5KM preventing drone flights above 100-grammes. This has been a source of frustration for months but understandable for safety reasons when airfields are often sited next to such remote locations.

Punishing dirt road

Our drive back towards Broome was on 95KM of temporary dirt road while the main dirt ‘highway’ was being rebuilt in advance of the next wet season. Fortunately I managed to sleep through much of it with the exception of a brief diversion at Beagle Bay to visit the Sacred Heart Church, internally decorated with inlaid mother-of-pearl.

It had been a long day (12-hours door to door) but the highlight of our trip around Australia to date.Expensive for sure but worth every cent. A huge adrenaline rush on the falls, stunning scenery at Cape Leveque, sharks a plenty, a salty crocodile and two seaplane flights over the Buccaneer Archipelago. Wow. And to top off the day, drinks with great friends as we watch the sun set into the Indian Ocean.

That is going to take some beating… but then we’ve only just started our Western Australia coastal journey.

After our adventure at Horizontal Falls and our flight to Cygnet Bay, a 4WD bus took us on the short drive to the Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm where we had a quick look around the shop trying to spot the most expensive pearls before our Kiwi guide took us on a tour of the farm.

The pristine waters off the Northern Western Australia coastline is home to the largest oyster in the world, the Pinctada Maxima. They are truly enormous with a weight in the hand to match.

Plastic Buttons

Initially the pearling industry in the Broome region was all about mother-of-pearl from the oyster’s shell and used mainly for buttons and decoration. But a drop in the market caused largely by new manufacturing materials, in particular plastic buttons, meant Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm needed to diversify in some way to survive.

Natural pearls found in wild oysters are extremely rare with only one in every 10,000 containing a gem. Diving to collect oysters is a dangerous pursuit and many ‘Pearlers’ have perished while gathering their catch. Due to the rarity of natural pearls a very enterprising Japanese gentleman by the name of Kokichi Mikimoto in 1893 developed a technique whereby a small piece of shell, shaped into a bead, was inserted into the body of the oyster where it acted as an irritant causing the oyster to build layer upon layer of nacre on the bead to smooth the irritant. This mimicked the natural process of the oyster when irritants from grains of sand, shell or food could not be ejected. The eventual efforts of Mikimoto’s research was the world’s first cultured pearl.

The secret is discovered

Not surprisingly the technology was kept secret but experiments by Lyndon Brown, the founders’ son, at Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm eventually discovered the culturing technique and within a few years the farm’s fortunes had turned. Now these South Sea pearls are the most prized in the world with prices to match.

The farm now grows its own oysters and once mature they join the seeded wild oysters kept off-shore in cages and ‘harvested’ after approximately 5-years. They can be re-seeded several times to produce multiple cultured pearls. Once ‘retired’ the oyster meat is then extracted for consumption. Eating one of these giants would be a real challenge.

We found one!

Our guide opened one of the oysters to show where the pearl grows and there, sat glistening, was an almost perfectly round 11.5mm pearl. Each pearl is graded on a scale with A1+ being the best and, as chance would have it, that is exactly how this one was later graded and valued at a shade over $1,000.

Following the tour and another visit around the store we made our way to the restaurant where a lunch of grilled barramundi and coconut rice was included in our trip. Before, once again, boarding the bus to the next very special location of our trip.

More information on the history of Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm and available tours: www.cygnetbaypearlfarm.com.au

No, this isn’t the title to a romantic novel or a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the NASA Lunar Landing, this is an unusual but entirely natural phenomenon here on the coast of Broome, Western Australia.

Cameras at the Ready

After the sun has passed beyond the horizon and the Milky Way is lighting-up the sky, a crowd can be found gathering along the coast with cameras in-hand eagerly waiting in anticipation of this 2-3 times a month event between March and October, which falls mostly, and conveniently, during the dry season.

At precisely the advertised time a dim glimmer on the black horizon begins to glow and camera shutters start to clatter. Within minutes a deep orange crescent begins to appear, slowly expanding into a glowing ball and casting bright streaks across the wet tide exposed mud flats. This isn’t a sunrise, though it could easily be mistaken for one, this is likely the strangest moonrise you’ll witness, this is the Staircase to the Moon.

Due to the extreme tides, which are among the largest in the world, and a shallow bay, the tide reaches out for several kilometres leaving the extensive mud flats high and dry during the low tide. As the moon begins to rise it’s white reflected light from the sun passes side-on through the Earth’s shallow atmosphere filtering the blue hues and leaving just the yellows and reds that create our orange moonrise. And as the moon continues to rise higher into the sky the moonlight takes a shorter path through the atmosphere and less colour is filtered rendering the moon its more familiar blue/white hue.

Photographing the moon is rarely easy. For one it is much smaller than it appears in your viewfinder but it is also extremely bright against the blackness of space, bright enough that it can be clearly seen during daylight hours. Secondly the dark sky misleads camera meters resulting in overexposure of the moon and only a very limited, and very expensive, number of cameras are able to record such extreme contrast.

Unfortunately on our visit it was sufficiently windy that, even with a sturdy tripod, the long lens moved enough to blur many of my attempts to photograph this phenomenon. Hopefully we may get a second chance later on our trip as we head further west.

Date and times for the Staircase to the Moon can be found on the Broome Visitor Centre website.

Pronounced ‘Der-bee’ not ‘Dar-bee’ as in the originating English town name, Derby is a small town on the Kimberley coast between Darwin and Broome. Sitting at the edge of an enormous estuary, Derby has the second highest tides in the world reaching as much as 11.8-metres during King tides. And that, unfortunately, is all it really has going for it apart from the sunsets over the Indian Ocean.

Loch Street is lined with Boab trees where the Tourist Information Centre is located. Very helpful staff unless you arrive 15-minutes from closing time when you can expect to be made to feel somewhat unwelcome.

Running parallel on Clarendon Street is Jila cafe where you can enjoy fresh cakes and pastries as well as Italian style meals in the evening as we did. There’s also an interesting collection of books to read while sipping an iced coffee and several Italian motorbikes on display for those with a two-wheel bent.

Sitting on the estuary means mud flats and here in Derby they are enormous, literally as far as you can see to the east, west and north. Our caravan site backed onto the western edge of the flats with very little to see but at least we were mostly sheltered from the wind with some well established trees.

A loading terminal at the jetty just north of Derby town centre can be reached along Jetty Road and is a popular spot to watch the sun set or fish for dinner, as long as the crocodiles don’t beat you to the catch.

Also by the jetty is the Derby Wharf Restaurant serving table meals as well as take-aways such as the local fish & chips. However, we made the mistake of eating here one evening and were served, after a very long wait, with over-cooked fish and chicken dishes. And add to that the elderly ‘entertainer’ who can neither sing or play his guitar too well through his distorted sound system. Normally an evening musician would get a clap or some form of applause after each tune but here you could hear a seagull fart several hundred metres away.

Things to do

Tourist points of interest are the Old Gaol and a little further away the Prison Tree where, supposedly, those not conforming to the rules of the time were held captive in the hollow of the Boab tree trunk. And secondly, not forgetting the longest cattle trough ‘south of the equator’ all 120-metres of it. Those with a pastoral background may find this a little more captivating than us.

One saving grace is the clever art form close to the Kimberley Entrance caravan park. It’s not immediate what it is or what it represents but wait until closer to sunset when people armed with cameras arrive and you’ll soon discover the hidden image. Impressive what can be created with a few discrete pieces of steel.

Pretty much everything else was either closed, closing or closed down. The local swimming pool displayed its open swimming times but the gates were firmly locked and the IGA supermarket gave the impression of a store ransacked in a riot with largely empty shelves.

Derby, it’s a town not just asleep during the busy tourist season, it’s in a coma.