Day 1

After about 31 hours of travel from PDX to LAX to Melbourne to Perth, I arrived at the Perth Intercontinental Hotel around 2pm and met Aidé in the lobby. We departed for a city bus tour of Perth around 3:30 pm which included a stop at Kings Park & Botanical Garden and a beach with some brave surfers riding winter waves. (However, the water temperature is around 70 degrees F.)

A "meet & greet" was held at 6:30pm for all Lindblad travelers. We went over final details for traveling to Broome the following morning. Then Aide and I went out to share some Thai food. Yum! I was thankful to go to bed at a reasonable time and slept well.

Day 2

Breakfast was a nice buffet and we departed for Perth airport early. After getting checked in as a group, we took off for Broome. The flight was a bit over 2 hours and we landed in the late morning. We hopped onto a tour bus and made several stops including a beach which had a line of parading camels. Camels were imported to Australia from India and are now highly prevalent in the area-so much so, that they are sometimes exported.

We arrived at the National Geographic Orion in the evening, met our mentor Martin and reconnected with Taneesh.  Then, we completed a safety briefing which included life boat assignments. Martin lead us on a ship tour and we had dinner with the staff. I enjoyed meeting the naturalists and trying the barramundi fish for dinner!

(Oh, and I accidentally reformated my SD card on the camera which deleted all of my photos from these first couple of days. Oops. Hopefully, that'll be the only time that happens.)