For fun, love and adventure: Lombadina magic

Lombadina magic

We spent a day in the beautiful community of Lombadina. It’s one of the first Aboriginal communities we’ve been to (Middle Lagoon was really a family-owned thing, rather than a community) and I think it will be hard to find another one like it.

A big, green lawn is the centre of the community with big, lush, tropical trees growing all around it. Surrounding it is the bakery (wood-fired), store, health clinic, school, church, old op shop, art and craft place and the artefact shed (the admin office is at the entrance to the community). We made sure we were there on a day the bakery was cooking and devoured a whole loaf of piping hot fresh bread for morning tea. We had butter and jam and vegemite and it was delicious! The bakery works Mon, Wed and Fri and they only sell white bread. One loaf is $3.60 which I thought was a bargain given 2 L of milk, some ham and 1kg of carrots had cost me $17 in the shop!

We got special permission (in addition to our $10/car permit) to go to the beach…and none of us were prepared for such a spectacular beach! We crossed at least 300 m of white sandy dunes and then were met by a big, beautiful bay. It was amazing. We had the beach all to ourselves for the first hour (the only other person we could see was a tinnie in the middle of the bay) and had a great swim. The tide was going out and gee the tides move around here! In less than 20 minutes where we were splashing around had gone from reaching the tops of my legs to only being around my ankles!

A 4WD with some local men zoomed past us and waved cheerily and it’s then that we realized how big this beach was – they kept driving for at least another 5 minutes before they stopped and they still hadn’t reached the end of the bay.

Lombadina is magic.

We camped at an outpost from there, about 9 km south at Chile Creek. Not sure why but the campground felt very special and serene set in the bush. The bathrooms were just so lovely (the best we’ve had for ages) but unfortunately the mossies were out in force even in the middle of the day. And they just drove us away. But not before we’d checked out the beach twice (again, all to ourselves) and had the best bit of beachcombing ever. We found shells the size of Simon’s feet while driving along the beach.

We knew high tide was at 11am in Broome so we estimated it would be around noon here so we were on the beach by 9am and off before 10am and were lucky to get off when we did because if we’d left it even 10 minutes longer we wouldn’t have been able to reach the access point off the beach down near the creek! These tides are so FAST!