Advertisement
We finally left Cairns late on 3 May. All real estate agents should be shot. After promising to be there at nine she arrived at 2pm (after some coaxing) and then proceeded to take no less than 3 hours to do the inspection, requiring a livid Christine to follow her around with a cloth wiping things we had already cleaned. Nevertheless we got every cent of bond back and maintained our record of not a single $ of bond going to those nasty bastard agents for any house we have rented.
The first part of our trip followed closely on our earlier trip up to Cooktown. The first night we made it to Daintree village and then took the coast road up to the Lions Den the next day and had a number of quiet ales to celebrate the beginning of the trip. We were planning to take the inland route called the CREB track which is much rougher and very scenic but unfortunately, despite several weeks of good weather, National Parks was unable to have the road open.
On the third day we went through Cooktown and out to nearby Hope Vale (one of the indigenous communities
I worked with at Cape York Partnerships). An old bloke called Eddie Deemal who has returned to his traditional land after working all over the country has set up a very basic but beautiful camping ground operation on the beach at Elim which is on Hope Vale community land, north of the town itself. The camping spot was beautiful, under some massive paperbark trees just back from the beach and the mangroves and perfect to help us get in the swing of traveling again after working in Cairns and Canberra for so long. We spent three days there reading, trying unsuccessfully to cook damper and catch fish and more successfully testing out our crab trap in the nearby mangroves as the photos attest - the crab was delicious! We also climbed the sanddunes a couple of kms down the beach to look at the famous coloured sands which were beautiful.
After our stay at Hope Vale we drove across to Lakefield NP through Battle Camp (named for a bloody encounter or massacre that happened when several hundred local people attacked miners traveling from Cooktown to the Palmer River goldfields in the late 19th Century.) After stopping off to see
some pastoral history at Old Laura Station Homestead we found a campsite at 12 mile waterhole which lies on one of the many rivers that run through Lakefield NP. Lakefield is in reality mostly a massive wetland that drains the Laura Basin into Princess Charlotte bay. It is a very wild place, full of lagoons and crocodiles.
The first night there, after discussing how good it was to be out in the wilderness Christine went up to our tent on the roof (best purchase ever by the way) and I was packing up the camp and turning out the lights, a dingo let off a howl about 10m from me. We hadn’t heard any up until then and it was so close I thought I could smell its breath and I shot up the ladder to our oasis on the roof. Perhaps the dingo was calling its mates for some Fraser island type fun (a friend told me how a group of people they were with had a few drinks one night on Fraser and were too lazy to set up tents so they just went to sleep on the beach. Early in the morning one of them woke
Coloured Sands
This climb nearly killed us - never go walking in the desert! up to find a dingo had hold of her foot and was trying to drag her out of her sleeping bag!).
For the next two days we fished for barra in the waterhole, working the banks with lures. I caught 2 but both were undersize at about 45cm (58cm is legal) and despite being two of the largest fish I ever caught I had to throw them back without even a macho picture of me holding fish for the blog. Christine didn’t catch any at all so we left Lakefield having had a lot of fun but a little disappointed. We drove north to Coen to catch up with an ex-colleague Bruce who was working with the community up there over some of the worst corrugations ever (once again on NP roads). Some of these puppies were at least 30cm high and it felt like both the car and its occupants were going to fall to bits after a couple of kms - luckily both held together.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.193s; Tpl: 0.022s; cc: 12; qc: 50; dbt: 0.1401s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb