What it means is, “Protect our wildlife. Don’t start a fire out here in the bush that will kill the frilled lizard or any other animals.”

Sounds impossible, but I’m sure we’ve seen millions of acres burned as we’ve driven around Australia. The fires are started by lightning, by campfires getting out of control, by aborigines as part of their traditions, and I suppose even by arsonists (No, America does not have an exclusive on lunatics).

We’ve seen smoke on the horizon and up-close. We’ve driven past flames burning right alongside the road. There are just so many fires out here and so much land and so few people and so little water that unless lives and property are in immediate danger, the fires are just allowed to burn until a rainstorm puts them out or they run out of flammable material.

The vegetation out here has evolved to live with and sometimes even require occasional burns. Some plants depend on fire to propagate their seeds.

Bizarre, isn’t it?

Ladies and gentlemen, please be introduced to the perentie. We had never seen nor heard of this frightening looking creature, but after seeing three of them in the last ten days I had to do a little Googling to find out what the heck it was.

Depending on who you talk to, the perentie is the third or fourth largest lizard in the world, right after the Komodo dragon and the water monitor. Your average one is, believe it or not, about five and a half feet long and weighs over 30 pounds. But I’m pretty sure the ones we saw were somewhere between the size of a pick-up truck and a T-Rex.

We were driving along about ten days ago when Jamie spotted our first perentie looking like he was doing pushups on the side of the highway. She hollered, “What the hell is that?” I turned the car around and she jumped out with her camera, but he was quickly scuttling away.

These suckers can move. I mean really move. Now that we’ve seen three of them scurry away as we tried to take their photos, I can assure you that I would not want to have an angry perentie chasing me across the outback.

Hell, I wouldn’t even want a happy one chasing me.

Odds are your expectations will not be very high when you book a room at place named the Turkey Creek Roadhouse. Yet, thanks to a series of misadventures that I won’t bother to detail at this time, Jamie and I spent two nights here on our last trip to Australia and quite enjoyed it.

In one direction Turkey Creek is about 500 miles from Broome (population 16,000) and in the other direction it’s about 100 miles from Kununurra (population 5,000). There’s not a major city for thousands of miles in any direction.

It customers include local stockmen, long haul truckers, dirt poor aborigines from the community down the road, and of course, the occasional tourist wanting to stretch his legs and get an ice cream.

We aren’t staying at Turkey Creek this trip, but we were driving past and decided to stop in for a short break. The clerk had a thick French accent, so as I was paying my bill I said, “”How does a Frenchman end up working at a roadhouse in a place like Turkey Creek?”

“I wanted to learn English,” he said, “but not in Kununurra or Broome because too many people speak French in those places.”

I nodded and smiled, but thought that was one of the oddest things I’ve ever heard. We’ve spent days in both towns and never heard anyone speak French. Not one word.

As the say in the French, “Le huh?”

We had our longest drive of the trip today — eleven hours across a beautiful region called The Kimberley. We drove all the way from Broome, which sits on the Indian Ocean, to Kununurra, a town that sits very near Western Australia’s border with the Northern Territory.

The drive would have taken less time, but Jamie loves boab trees, so I had strict orders to pull the car over so she could take photos whenever she saw one that (a) was really big, (b) sat pretty much by itself, and (c) stood out on the horizon.

Obviously, boabs are very strange trees. As you can see, they can be huge. The trunk is shaped like a bottle, which is appropriate because they store all the water they can suck up during the rainy season and live on it during the dry season. They have leaves and large white flowers for half the year, but this is obviously not that half of the year.

When I say they store water, I’m not exaggerating. We once saw one that had a water tap stuck through its trunk about two feet off the ground. You could turn on the faucet and potable water would pour out.

I wonder if they have a boab in Moab.

Millions, literally millions of termite mounds of all shapes and sizes are scattered across the Western Australia and Northern Territory landscapes. Termites build them out of chewed up cellulose, spit, dirt and any other disgusting ingredient they can come up with, then move the family in while they continue building it larger and larger.

You just can’t imagine how many of them there are nor how large they can get.

In fact, here’s Jamie standing in front of one just so you can get a little perspective.

Sun Pictures, the world’s oldest outdoor cinema, has been showing movies outdoors here in Broome since 1916. It screens a different film every night and on some nights they screen two.

What’s an outdoor cinema? Well, it’s like a cross between a regular movie theater and a drive-in. Except that it’s a walk-in.

From the street, it looks like an ordinary building. But when you walk inside you realize that it’s only half a building because the back half is wide open and uncovered. There’s even a nice lawn located between the front row of seats and the screen, so families can picnic while they watch a movie.

Speaking of seats, they’re all deck chairs. Well, not exactly all, because people can bring their own lawn chairs and set them up wherever there’s a space.

We went to see Turbo, not because we wanted to see yet another animated movie, but because that’s what was playing tonight and we wanted to experience a movie under the stars and to see the moon rise over the screen (that’s it up there above and to the left of the screen).

Which brings up an interesting question: Why do they call it Sun Pictures when it’s only open at night?

If I haven’t made it abundantly clear already, we love Broome. The town promotes itself by saying “It’s where the outback meets the ocean.”

The intersecting colors — the red dirt of the outback, the white sand of the beach and the blues of the ocean and sky — are spectacular, aren’t they?

We went out to Gantheaume Point to take photos of the spot where red dirt, white sand and blue ocean come together. We walked to the edge of a strange rock formation to look down at the ocean and were very surprised to see two guys diving off the cliffs.

I, of course, walked over to talk to them and find out if they were certified lunatics or just ordinary street variety lunatics.

They said that if we had come by on Sunday instead of Tuesday we would have seen about 60 people, including a four year old kid, diving off the cliff. They also said that it’s only safe to dive about 45 minutes each side of high tide.

I thought they were interesting young guys. Jamie thought they were hot young guys.

On one of our earlier trips down under we were driving across the Nullarbor Plains from Adelaide to Perth. It’s a long, boring three-day drive and Jamie had just tilted her seat back to take a little nap when I slammed on the brakes and screamed, “Camel!”

Sure enough, a big honkin’ male camel was grazing along the side of the road. We jumped out of the car to take photos, but he was wary of us and made sure that we never got closer than 50-100 feet.

Most people are surprised to learn that there are camels in Australia. With good reason. They aren’t native to Australia, but thousands of them were imported in the 19th century for transportation and construction in the central and western parts of the country. Trucks and railroads eventually did away with the need for the camels so many of them were simply released into the outback.

That means Australia is now the only country in the world where herds of feral camels roam freely. Of course, the camels did what comes naturally — hump — and now they think there may be more than 1,000,000 of them out there.

Some of the wild ones have been tamed and are now used to pry money out of tourists like Jamie. She loves them. On previous trips, we’ve ridden them at sunrise at Ayer’s Rock and at sunset on Cable Beach here in Broome. This morning we completed the trifecta by riding them at sunrise on Cable Beach.

Camels, of course, can go days without drinking, a feat that’s impossible for most Australians. If you know what I mean.

I used to love Maui so much that I thought I’d retire there but that dream ended when the island began turning into a smaller version of Waikiki. Too much traffic, too many tourists, too many condos, and the last straw for me, a Costco. I missed the small town Maui that I loved so much on my first visit.

That explains why we love Broome. It’s a small town (population 16,000) out in the middle of nowhere that looks and feels just like Lahaina looked and felt 30 years ago. But because it’s so far off the beaten track, I think it will stay this way as long as I’m around to see it.

Tonight we went to Broome’s Sunday night market. The main street was closed down and vendors moved in to sell their wares. There were exotic foods, hand-made jewelry and clothing, funky longhaired artists, and everything else you’d expect to find at a tropical market.

A great little band was playing down at one end of the street, right outside the gritty bar where all the local guys hang out. Giant fruit bats were swooping overhead. Warm tropical breezes were wafting. And everyone had smiles on their faces.

And to top it all off, a drunken old aborigine woman came over and held hands with me after telling me that the young guitar player in the band was her boyfriend.

Maybe he is, but I still think I have a shot.