For travellers by ship, Broome is the gateway to the extraordinary Kimberley region, but that’s not all. It is also the pearling capital of Australia and boasts fantastic white sand beaches and memorable sunsets.

Talbot Bay is home to one of the world’s most unusual natural wonders, the ‘Horizontal Falls’. This amazing spectacle occurs when tidal movements force water through the narrow gaps in the ridges either side of Poulton Creek, with the water building up on one side quicker than it can flow through the gap, causing a spectacular waterfall effect.

Montgomery Reef was once described as the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’ by Sir David Attenborough. At low tide the sea level drops so rapidly that the waters trapped inside the reef create a raging torrent as they escape, teeming with wildlife including turtles, sea birds, sharks, octopuses and even dugongs.

Vansittart Bay lies close to the northern tip of Western Australia, and is home to some interesting examples of aboriginal rock art. You can also take a trip across a lagoon to visit the intact wreckage of a C-53 aircraft that crash landed here during the Second World War.

Wyndham is the oldest major settlement in the Kimberley region, a former gold rush town surrounded by mangrove swamps and mudflats. The town is also the gateway to the remarkable Bungle Bungle mountains, known to the local aborigines for centuries but only ‘discovered’ by the outside world in the 1980s.

More of a large town than a city, Darwin is less about what’s contained within the city limits and more about the huge expanse of wild landscape that’s outside it. Closer to Jakarta than Sydney, the city really does feel remote in its tropical perch.