Advertisement
Published: September 13th 2013
Edit Blog Post
The Red Dirt - all pervasiveMusgrave Station roadhouse has a grave It is a mound of red dirt underneath an ancient mango tree at the Roadhouse entrance. It's the grave of Samuel Thompson which coincidentally is the name of my great grandfather. They didn't get to be too old up here in the early days this bloke was 36 when he died. Too many things can get you in this place Crocs, box jellyfish, drunken brawling miners, irakanji, sea snakes, taipans, brown snakes, stingers and let's not forget the innocuous (not) stonefish and that's just for starters. I am calling this trip Survivor Cape York. We headed up the Peninsula Development Road towards Port Stewart Road which
takes you to the east coast. Wayne found a track on the map that he thought B2 might like to play on. Yep she was rough alright and we were in hillbilly country because it's a gold mining area there were heavily secured premises around. This "shortcut" that took two hours , was fun. We landed back in Coen. Yay - Civilization ... Coen where the whites are not particularly friendly but the indigenous people are. We caught up with phone calls, Internet etc and headed off towards Archer River Roadhouse for a burger. My idea of a roadhouse and the actuality of them on the Cape are completely different, what a dumb cluck I am. I expected them to be a little bit like - maybe the BP at Coomera - not quite so grand but shows that I dont get out of
the city much. Wayne on the other hand thought they were better than he expected. Let's say that there was petrol and food and little else in the way of supplies so i realised how unprepared I was in the food supplies stakes.Anyway we took off down the PDR ( experienced traveller speak for the Peninsular Development Road). We found the turnoff to Portland Roads and Chili Beach. Not far into that road a nondescript track took us to the Batavia Gold fields. I drove B2 around while Wayne took some pics. There are a lot of diggings and also the rusting mining equipment like old crushers and tractors, boilers etc. There were people camped there but they looked like they had been there for a long time maybe trying to strike it rich finding the elusive Golden Boulder just like my Grandfather did. We thought we would have a dig around as there were a lot of crystal like quartz rocks around. Nothing - nada, not that I would even know
what to look for.Driving on towards Chili Beach we encountered some really incredibly beautiful mountain ranges in the Iron Range National Park. MT Tozer gap sits on heathlands and the imposing Mount Tozer on one side and the Iron Range is it's backdrop on the other. On those mountains ant mounds at least twice the size of the surrounding gum trees stood watch over everything like the silent sentinel statues on Easter Island. The big Volcanic cliff faces are rather imposing and command your attention.Further on and we came to the road junction to Lockhart River township, but we didn't go there because it's a dry community and we had alcohol in the fridge. We didn't want to risk a $41000 fine.<br style="color: font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial,
sans-serif; font-size: 13.333333969116211px; line-height: 18.88888931274414px;" />Then on to Chili Beach. It is a really lovely place when the wind is not blowing at about 35 knots. We arrived quite late to the beach camp ground without thinking much about the weather. Set up for the night and went for a walk along the beach. In better weather this place would look quite spectacular.Before long we realized it was a really bad move to camp so close to the beach the weather was appalling and the wind and rain was sideways. So after a hastily prepared dinner we crawled up into the shelter of the rooftop tent which I have to say stood up to the cyclone outside quite well it was cosy and enough shelter. I was pretty sure there a couple of times during the night that the whole car with us inside the tent on the roof was going to be flipped up. We didn't sleep well at all and couldn't wait for dawn to get away from the wind.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.102s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 48; dbt: 0.0638s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb