Unbelievable...

---

As soon as I got back to Cairns from Cape Trib after the festival, I got on the computer and made a load of signs to put up in hostels asking for a lift up the Cape York Peninsula. The next morning I got up early and prepared myself for a day of walking round the city in circles, forgetting where I had already been and desperately looking for some shade from the midday sun (I don't really like walking around Cairns much)! It would be a long day, and maybe a frustrating wait for a reply, but I knew it would be worth it if I found someone. 30 minutes of hard work and 3 hostels later, I got to the place I usually stay in Cairns, and someone had put up a notice offering a lift for a 10 day tour of Cape York. I phoned them, and within 15 minutes was meeting them at the lagoon on the Esplanade. They were 3 Germans guys, and they also had another German guy and a Canadian coming with them. While I was talking to them, a German girl phoned and she came and joined us. I can't get away from Germans here! I wanted to go for longer than 10 days, but it may be coming to the end of the Dry season soon and I didn't want to wait. All my doubts disappeared when the guys told me it would only be 300 dollars (150 pounds) each for the car for the whole time. It was Wednesday and they were planning to leave on Friday. They had everything organised and I have camping gear with me now, so all that was left was to buy food. The next day we went to the supermarket and bought enough food to feed the whole of Australia for 10 days (what if it rains and we get stuck behind a creek for days in the middle of nowhere?) and enough water to overload the roof rack on the car alone.

Well, you probably guessed by now that where we were going is quite remote. The Cape York Peninsula is the north-east area of Australia (get a map!). The 'Tip' of the Peninsula is the northernmost point of mainland Australia and it is around 1000km north from Cairns (without all our detours!) and about 160km south of Papua New Guinea. North of Cape Trib and inland, most of the 'towns' are indigenous or islander (Torres Strait Islands) commuinities, and it is mostly wilderness. There is a road straight to the top called the Old Telegraph Track, which was made to lay a telegraph line so the communities on the Cape could communicate by morse code. It wasn't made for driving, more to be the cheapest and shortest route for the line, and it has a lot of creek crossings. The Peninsula Developmental Road avoids a lot of crossings and is a lot easier to drive so that is the route we took. There is a lot of grassland and eucalypt forests as well as some rainforest and many rivers and creeks which were mostly dry, as it is the end of the Dry season.

Day 1: On Friday, we picked up the car and drove to Mareeba, back on the Tablelands near Atherton to pick up 2 guys that were working there. It took us a few hours to pack the car- it was an 11-seater 4WD and there were 7 of us with camping gear, clothes, way too much food and 2 spare tyres. We took the inland route since we were already in Mareeba, about 60km inland from Cairns. (The coastal route would be via Cape Trib AGAIN!). I had already been along that road most of the way, to the festival and it is a fairly boring drive. We made it to Laura that day, an aboriginal community with a population of around 120. We stayed at a roadhouse there, and enjoyed setting up our tents and unloading the car for the first time, something we would get used to over the next few days!

Day 2: In the morning, we visited Split Rock, which is one of the rock art sites around the town. It was really interesting to see the paintings. They were mostly of people, animals and spirits (Quinkans), but I don't think anyone knows exactly what they mean. The paintings are about 15,000 years old and are considered to be some of the most important rock art sites in the world. We left Laura and headed towards Lakefield National Park. It must look incredibly different in the Wet season. It is mostly eucalypt forests and grassland (probably wetlands in the Wet) and there are lots of lakes of course. There are lots of feral pigs on the Cape but the only ones we saw were dead and very smelly ones on the road. We also saw thousands of termite mounds. There are different types- some are attached to trees because the termites eat wood, others are rounded, and the most interesting ones (magnetic termite mounds) are flat and built with a north-south orientation to control the temperature. We decided to drive right through the park and camp at Musgrave Roadhouse as we were short of time.

Day 3: We drove north past Coen, a small town with a population of under 300, and took a detour to the Iron Range National Park, one of the relatively small areas of rainforest on the Cape. On the way, we stopped at the Archer River Roadhouse and there was an English girl working there. Most of the roadhouses are just that- a campsite and shop and no town. She was a backpacker with a working visa like me, and it seemed a strange place to work. She drives about 300km each way to Weipa on the west coast to do her food shopping. We camped at Chilli Beach, which was a beautiful beach surrounded by coconut palms and rainforest, with white sand and clear blue water, but covered in litter at the tide line. A man at the Musgrave Roadhouse was there the previous night and he told me it would be, but there was much more than I expected. He said most of it is stuff that's not even sold in this country, it's just washed up from everywhere. It was our first night bushcamping, right behind the beach, and we didn't want to admit we were all a little scared about crocs, although it's a popular campsite in the national park and we knew it was safe really. But we were happy to make it to morning.

Day 4: I got up in time for the beautiful sunrise and found a freshly fallen coconut on the beach which I husked and opened. It was the first one I ever found that was fresh, and it was lovely. We drove to a nearby place called Portland Roads which had a nice little beach. We asked about a track on the map that went directly west from Chilli Beach, and would save us retracing our drive from the previous day and heading south for a couple of hours back to the road. We decided to try it. It was called the Frenchman's Track and the sign we followed was broken at both ends and just said "NCHM". I pointed out it could have said "Frenchmans Track 2km on left" but we decided to go for it. Well it took an hour to do 9 of the 52km. And then we reached a really steep, rocky creek. After about half an hour of pointing at rocks and moving them around on the opposite bank we decided to turn back and go the long way instead. So we didn't get as far as we had hoped that day and ended up at another roadhouse, Bramwell Junction, that night. I had been looking forward to camping at waterfalls that night, but the giant magnetic termite mounds at the campground were worth seeing at least.

Day 5: It wasn't a very long drive to the waterfalls in the Jardine River National Park. The first one we came to, Fruit Bat Falls, was pretty awesome, but we couldn't camp there. So we spent a few hours swimming and having the best massages ever standing under the water. I was the cleanest I've been since working on the farms. It was good to see water! And I can't imagine what they must be like in the Wet season if they were that good at the end of the Dry. Well, I thought they were beautiful but when we got to the campsite and walked to the waterfalls there, they literally took my breath away. We spent the afternoon swimming and exploring the waterfalls there, Twin Falls and Elliot Falls. A river and a creek meet just downstream from the falls, so there is just one spot on the opposite bank of the point where they join where you can see both falls. We made a campfire that night and sat around it for hours looking at the stars.

Day 6: I went for an early morning swim at sunrise and we all spent the whole morning swimming again. If we thought the previous day was perfect we were wrong because it only got better when we left the falls. We didn't have too far to drive to 'The Tip' and we knew we would make it even though we left late. We got the ferry across the Jardine River and were in the Northern Peninsula Area, so close. There are 5 aboriginal and islander communities up there, we passed through Bamaga, the biggest, with a population of almost 800. We set up camp at Seisa and went to the supermarket to buy some fresh fruit and veggies, the first chance we had since leaving Cairns. Then we set off to our destination. It was a pretty rough road up there and surprisingly un-signposted. Lots of people go up there each year, from May to October, and I thought it would be a lot more touristy, but we got to a car park with no sign and walked along a track through the rainforest. We came out close to a beach and asked someone the way. We walked over rocks and the breathtaking view only got better as we got higher. We got over and headed back down the other side, towards the sea. When we could go no further we were at the Tip, easy! There is a small sign there, but that is all. One other person came for a few minutes while we were there, apart from him, it was all ours. It was more than any of us had expected, the view and the remoteness. We could see the Torres Strait Islands and a huge, white beach. The sun started going down so we walked back up to the highest point and watched. Some Polish people came up and thought they were there, but it was a bit hard to believe because it is blatantly obvious that if you are trying to get to the northernmost point of a country that is surrounded by water you have to be at the edge of the sea...right? So after they had taken photos with a Polish flag and opened cans of beer and it was clear they actually thought they were there, I told them they still had further to go. We walked back to the car in the dark and drove back to the campsite, where we had a barbecue and celebrated reaching the top and having 2 unbelievably perfect days.

Day 7: You really have to drive down the same, or a very similar, way to the route you took up, so we wanted to get to new territory as soon as possible. We travelled about 570km and stayed at the Musgrave River Roadhouse again. On the way, at the Jardine Ferry, I talked to the guy in the shop and he was from one of the islands, but his dad is originally from Leeds which was a bit random!

---