Eighty Mile Beach to Broome

This is one of our many favourite places on the west coast. The camping is good, and if you're lucky you'll have a site with grass. The water here is plentiful and tastes great. The caravan was filthy so we gave it a quick wash down on our site, and there's a dedicated wash down area for cars. We stayed here for a very relaxing 3 nights and the weather was amazing.

There's lots of driving on the beach, which we couldn't recall from our previous stays here. We didn't take the car onto the sand, but enjoyed 3 lovely sunsets from the lookout points within the park. Shell collecting is really popular, so while the men fish, the women scour the beach for pretty shells.

They discourage any swimming in the beach, as there are a potentially dangerous creatures in the water, i.e. a dog was bitten and killed by a sea snake a few years ago.

When we were first here in May 2005, we ran all way out into the water for a swim. There were many horrified faces when we walked out of the water. No sea snake got us and we lived to tell the tale!

The next time we were here in May 2012, and while we were washing our van on site, and Alan accidentally sprayed our neighbours. They ended up being good friends who we had repeated contact with for many years.

Why they call it Eighty Mile Beach still amuses us. Until 1946 it was called Ninety Mile Beach, but it's actually 140 miles (220 kms) long. In 1946 the name was changed to Eighty Mile Beach to avoid confusion with Ninety Mile Beach in Victoria. It would have been more spectacular to have changed it to "One Hundred and Forty Mile Beach" — a bit of a mouthful, yes, but wow!

As we had our van booked in to get a leaking pipe fixed in Broome at 10am, we stayed at Roebuck Plains Roadhouse. From there it's an easy 33 kms drive to Broome.

There was an added advantage: Alexis was able to drive out there when she finished work and join us for a huge meal at the roadhouse.

The repair took no time at all, and not what we would call a repair (they didn't even charge us), but Alan did watch how they were trying to fix the leak and he was able to correctly repair it later, and hopefully this will last.

So we headed to our very special private camping place and the best camping location in Australia! With really good neighbours.

We love Broome and it's definitely one of our most favourite places.

We hear all sorts of comments about Broome from other travellers, both positive and negative. Some say they don't like Broome and avoid the place. We think they do that mostly because it's very busy during tourist season, and therefore expensive.

Some of these negative people would rather stay way out at Roebuck Plains and drive into Broome each day, than admit that they are tight and don't want to stay in town. There are reasons why it's busy and expensive.

Broome is amazing and very beautiful. It's popular, not only with tourists, it's also a great place to live!

There's been a lot of work happening in Broome over the last few years. About 5 years ago they made significant improvements around Town Beach and Roebuck Bay, and next in line was Stage 1 of the Cable Beach swimming area precinct. The beach access and path has been completed renovated around the Surf Life Saving Club and looks brilliant. Stage 2 is happening now and the whole area is a construction zone. It's ugly and there are huge piles of red dirt and gigantic holes where they're working.

Worst of all is that there is no vehicle access onto the northern end of Cable Beach now. Sunsets on the beach are legendary, and to not be able to drive down is a real bummer. Gantheume Beach is the southern end of Cable Beach and they've slightly extended the area for cars to go down while this work is being completed. It's incredibly busy now, and it's not the same as having 22 km of pristine white sand to choose your spot.