Minyirr Park Walk

Getting ready to launch cuttlefish boat

Trying to dig out a ghost crab

grinding up some paint

being painted

Getting in on the grinding action

With the addition of black (charcoal)

Seconds after tooth falling out in Win Yueng grocery store

We spent most of yesterday hanging around town as a warning light on our car was in being checked out at a garage. We walked around, looked in a few shops, found an Asian grocery store, had a picnic lunch and then went to see Kung Fu Panda 2 as our first movie treat for the week. We all enjoyed it, then had a brief visit to the Broome museum which is quite interesting – the start of the pearling industry, the blend of different cultures that have been here for so long, indigenous, European, Japanese and Indonesian which makes it quite a different town to others in Australia (in a good way). The most exciting thing for the day really was that Daniel lost his first tooth (while in the Asian grocery store). It’s been wobbly for about a week now – he started off waiting patiently for it to fall out on its own, but after a couple of days got tired of that and started listening to Conor’s suggestions of wiggling, twisting etc and managed to get it out in the afternoon (he’s just been thinking of the cash$$$ that would come his way). Not to be outdone, Conor promptly yanked out his own wobbly tooth in the evening, ostensibly to save the tooth fairy two trips – it’s the first time she’s been to our house/tent for two teeth in one night! She managed to find us anyway, so everyone was excited this morning.

I happened to notice a poster in the Visitors’ Centre about some school holiday activities and rang up and booked into one for this morning, which was a guided walk with a local indigenous elder near the beach. As far as I understand it, a strip of land alongside the beach was given in a native title declaration to the local Yawuru people, so now they have a joint management group which was running this walk in conjunction with the local Dept Conservation for NAIDOC week. It meant that there was funding from a number of different sources so I felt that we were very lucky to happen upon it. First we went on a 2 hour walk up and down the sand dunes and along the beach, looking at a few plants and hearing about them, looking for ghost crabs by trying to dig them out of their holes (we found a few), looking at some hermit crabs, and sailing cuttlefish bones in the waves. The boys had a good run around and enjoyed that bit. Then we had lunch back where we started under a nice shady shelter, where they had orange and apple quarters, a sausage sizzle, some damper cooked on a fire with jam or honey, cold water/coffee/tea and biscuits. After we were completely stuffed they got some different coloured sandstones, added water and ground them down a bit until they got some coloured pastes and painted the kids’ faces, sending us home with a sticker. So it was about 3 ½ hours all up which we really enjoyed, and didn’t cost us a cent. All I could think of was how much better it was than the tour we did at Kooljamon which we paid $154 for! I’m now wishing I had seen it early enough to book into the whale watching session which was on yesterday – a local whale watching charter donated one of their boats for the morning, and took 29 kids out for free! Anyone want to move to Broome? Tonight we’re going to squeeze in a beer sampling session at Matso’s Brewery, before going to see Cars 2 at the outdoor cinema, where you sit in deck chairs under the stars – apparently you have to ignore the occasional 737 flying overhead as it’s very close to the airport