Broome, Australia: Pearls, Red Pindan Cliffs, and Cable Beach Sunsets

Cable Beach is the reason most people come to Broome. The beach runs straight and wide for twenty-two kilometers, with red pindan-clay cliffs rising at the southern end near Gantheaume Point. At low tide, 130-million-year-old dinosaur footprints are exposed in the reef rock at the base of those cliffs — they are difficult to find without knowing where to look, but the Broome Visitor Centre can direct you. At high tide the footprints disappear entirely.

The camel rides at sunset on Cable Beach have become Broome's most-photographed experience, and they are what they are: a string of camels walking along the water's edge as the sun drops into the Indian Ocean. The light is genuinely extraordinary in the dry season, when the sky goes orange and red against the white sand. Bookings are essential; operators take walk-ins only when space exists.

Broome's history as the center of the global pearling industry is real and complicated. At its peak in the early twentieth century, Japanese, Malay, Chinese, and Aboriginal divers worked the pearl beds under difficult conditions; the Japanese Cemetery in town holds the graves of hundreds who died in cyclones and diving accidents. The Broome Historical Museum in Chinatown covers this honestly. Chinatown itself is a small quarter of corrugated-iron buildings with a distinct multicultural character unlike any other Australian town.

The pearl industry still operates in Broome. Willie Creek Pearl Farm, thirty kilometers north of town, offers tours of a working pearl farm and explains the cultivation process. The shop at the end of the tour sells cultured South Sea pearls at farm-direct prices; the quality is genuine.

The wet season (November to April) brings extreme heat, cyclones, and spectacular lightning storms. Cruise ships call during the dry season (May to October), when temperatures are mild, skies are clear, and the beach is at its best.