Beagle Bay and Dinosaur Footprints

Beagle Bay church altar

fossilised dinosaur footprints at Gantheaume Point

Daniel's feet next to the fossils

After all this build up, we have finally arrived at our caravan park in Broome. After booking it in April 2010, wondering if we would ever get to stay here since we were still in south WA on the date of our original booking, wondering if we would actually *want* to stay a week in a caravan park this size (us and 499 other sites), we have finally arrived today. We left the top of the Dampier Peninsula this morning, stopped in at Beagle Bay to see the church which is decorated with mother of pearl originally collected mainly by aboriginal women of the community, which has a really beautiful effect. Then it was back down the bone rattler dirt road to Broome. We ran out of fuel on Wednesday morning and used two of our jerry cans, thinking it would get us all the way back to Broome – it did, but the last part was coasting as slowly as possible with the air conditioning off, with about 5k allowance. We did have two more jerry cans available but they’re harder to get at and it’s a real pain to use them as Nick has to hold them at the right height for about 15 minutes and pour it in slowly.

Anyway we are fully refuelled now, had a very late fish and chips lunch and set up camp at the caravan park, got a quick load of washing on before heading straight down to Gantheaume Point to try and see the fossilised dinosaur footprints. They are only visible at very low tide, which only happens on a few days each month at this time of year, so it was either today or Sunday or Monday I think that we would have the chance. So off we raced, to arrive right on low tide time with hundreds of other people swarming down over the clifftop to find them. It can’t be good for the coral that we were all tramping over to get to them, so I’m surprised they haven’t closed it off by now. They were pretty cool though, having said that – amazingly clear as you can see in the photographs, they almost look man made. There’s a couple of different dinosaurs’ footprints down there, and the ones visible today were either those of a Theropod or Megalosauropus Broomensis, not sure which. There was also of course a nice sunset to view as well, and an osprey nest in a nearby tower so you could hear the babies calling out to their mum or dad, who was sitting there eating a fish while they then took off for flying practice as the sun went down. Unfortunately the photos didn’t work out of that, it was too dark.