Cooktown

Oceania » Australia » Queensland » Cooktown
May 9th 2010

Published: May 14th 2010

Edit Blog Post

Mrs Smith

Cooktown building 1

The campsite at Cooktown is nice with ready made shades which come in handy as it starts to chuck it down later that evening and we sit under the shade and keep dry. We arrive here on a Sunday and the place is dead, it is a very small town and has beautiful old buildings and you can see it really hasn't changed much since the 1880's when it was a gold mining town. It is only recently that there has been a tarmacked road coming into town so tourism is still just developing.

We take a walk through the town past historic monuments to Captain Cook, this is the place where his boat got damaged when it struck the reef and he had to settle here for 48 days while the boat was fixed. You can tell he wasn't all to happy about this by the names of the places around here like "cape tribulation" and "weary bay".

As nightfalls the fruitbats come out and there are hundreds of them, it is really cool to watch them all flying around.

The family camping next to us is really nice and the bloke comes over and is chatting

The old bank, I bet they saw a lot of gold!

with us. Shenton tells him he wants to go fishing as this bloke is a fisherman and the next day he turns up with a rod for Shenton and just gives it to him. We said if we catch any fish we will send him a picture. I hope we catch some barramundi as they are lovely fish to eat.

Next morning we decide to leave Cooktown as we think 1 day is enough and even though we are still being told the roads are closed up North we head on our journey to the tip. I feel a lot better about it as we spoke with a girl at the inofrmation centre who has actually done the trip last year and she said it is not as bad as people have been telling us. Our guide book was written 10 years ago and the road conditions have improved a lot since then.

We head off to find a place called the coloured sands which apparently has 7 different sand colours in the dunes that you can see, unfortunately the road to get there is closed as there was so much rain last night so we have to

Cooktown Building 2

double back to Cooktown and on to Laura our next stop for the night. Shenton doesn't mind the detour too much as we get to go past the black mountains again which he wants to stop and hike around but people have got lost in amoungst the rocks here and there are 5 meter pythons living on the mountain so I talk him out of it.

On the way to Laura we go to find Isobella Falls as we think maybe we can have a swim in it, but as we get there we realise we are not going to swim in it we have to cross it in the car! I walk across to see how deep it is (hoping there are no crocs!) and then Shenton drives Tank straight through without a problem.

Just as we are heading into Laura we reach the top of a hill and as we cross over the crest we see loads of cattle in the road and about 6 Aboriginal guys on horseback dressed as cowboys. Shenton manages to stop in time and one of the cowboys tells us just to stay still and the cows will go around us!