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The following day we caught the ferry to Thursday Island, learning about how to catch dugong and turtle from “Auntie Jo” who sat next to us. It involves harpooning them with a short spear attached to a rope and floats and then following them around until they get tired - not terribly humane but apparently they taste good! Our time in Thursday Island (TI) would have to be one of the highlights of our cape trip, we stayed in the Federal Hotel where the food was excellent and leisurely explored the island, taking the ferry over to Horn Island to peruse the Torres Strait Heritage Museum and Art Gallery there.
There are an amazing amount of churches on TI, we counted about 7, and had a look through a quaint little cathedral near the centre of town. We spent some beautiful afternoons on the pubs verandah bringing up cold schooners and watching the coral sea and had a beer at the Torres as well which is Australia’s most northerly pub. Our last night in TI we went to an entertained dinner at the cultural centre where TV chef, Mark Olive was filming for his next season of shows (he
appears on ABCs message stick but this was for an Austar series called Outback Café - if anyone has pay TV you might ge to see us eating dinner!). The dinner was a delicious meal of barbequed cray-fish and salads using bush herbs and spices and afterwards traditional dancing from a dance troupe from Sabai Island. According to Mark wallaby is the veal of Australian meats, maybe if we mow one down in the Hilux we might get to test the theory. After four days on TI and we had run out of things to do so it was back on the ferry to Seisia.
You may have noted that we hadn’t been to the Tip yet and rightly so (the car had to get fixed first - blown out bushes on our new “heavy duty” shockies which the Pedders man had to fly up at his own expense which was good) so a bumpy 90 min drive got us out to “the tip” travelers jokingly refer to it as the rubbish tip, and after seeing it may give more weight to this viewpoint. Anyway, the northern most point of Australia is, I have to say a little disappointing
in that there is a dirty big island a couple of hundred metres off the coast. However we snapped off the obligatory photos and were back on our way.
On our way back down the Cape we stopped for a night in Twin Falls, beautiful falls however it was raining (a popular feature of this trip) so we only stayed one night and neglected to photo the falls, if you want to see them try Google. After the rain the road had turned to slush and we slipped and slid our way getting the car covered in mud and nearly collecting a few trees.
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