East Coast South to North

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Friday 29th July - Cooktown to Cairns via the Bloomfield Track

After a night’s rest in Cooktown all our warning lights have recovered their equilibrium, though sadly the air conditioning is still not working. Never mind, only one day back to Cairns and it’s on a nice shady track where we won’t be able to go too fast!
The first part of the “track”, to Helensvale, is actually a good tarmac road, so we arrived at our first stop, the Lion’s Den Hotel, about 9:15am. We thought that would be too early to be able to go in and have a drink, but it must be an “early opener”, ‘cos it was open and already serving customers! So in we went and had a lemon squash each. The road after Helensvale is almost immediately gravel, though a very good road. We all had morning tea at the Bloomfield Crossing, which has recently been significantly upgraded so (at least for a time) is not the potential stumbling block it once was. In the wet it can still be impassable because of the sheer volume and speed of water, and I suppose over a number of wet seasons all that water will degrade the crossing again. The track itself deteriorated significantly after the Crossing, but it was dry, and it was just a matter of proceeding with caution, especially over the other crossings which were very rocky. The most dangerous thing that happened to our group was a very large branch falling without warning and narrowly missing one of our vehicles.
We arrived at Wujal Wujal Falls to find an Outback Safari tour group just leaving (luckily not just arriving), and their local tour guides wanted to take our group up to the falls too. Unfortunately they wanted us to pay $15 each, a shame because I think if it had been just 1 or 2 dollars each we mostly would have cheerfully paid, and they would have made themselves an extra $30 or so on top of the organised tour group for which they were there. Sometimes people can be too opportunistic! The falls were certainly spectacular, and as with so many things up here, you can only imagine what they must be like in the wet.
Lunch at Woobadda Creek (WOO BADDA, I love that name!) was a lovely stop, and from there we wound our way up through the range and then down alongside spectacular coastline glimpsed through the rainforest to Cape Tribulation. As it was getting a bit late by this time, we only had a quick look around. For Nigel and me, this is familiar stamping ground, but always a beautiful place to be in. It’s certainly become a lot busier since we were first here in 1996! We had an icecream at the little cafe, and then it was on to the Daintree ferry where we queued for about half an hour to get across, finally arriving back in Cairns at about 6pm.

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Photos

The whole team reunited again
Preparing to leave Cooktown

At The Bar
Is it possible to feel a little blurry after one lemon squash each?

Leonie with the famous Klaxon
Where do they have the space to keep that thing?

Amazing Root Systems
also at Cape Tribulation