Nearly out of the red dust

So, teeth no longer gritted against corrugations, we are relaxing in Coen, halfway down the Cape from the tip to Cairns.

The vehicles ahead of us boarding the Jardine River Ferry,
just south of Cape York.

Our battery problems meant we had no power in our ‘home’ part of the motorhome while travelling so we simply cleared the crisper sections of the fridge and freezer, bought 2 bags of ice before we left the Bramwell Junction campground where there was no power, but we COULD run our generator, putting the fridge and freezer back in the game.

Today we drove to Coen, where once again we are plugged into power and tomorrow we’ll just add more ice for the fridge (the freezer lot will have re-frozen) before we set off for Cooktown.

We met an interesting bloke at Bramwell Junction. He’s a middle-aged Englishman, born in Cooma (we suspect his Dad was working on the Snowy Mtns scheme) but went back to the UK when little. He’s riding around Oz on his motorbike, which carried a tent, sleeping gear, cooking gear etc and he has another 5 months to go.

There were also 11 very fit cyclists, with some support vehicles, who are riding to the tip of the cape, then taking a boat to PNG, and doing the Kokoda Track.

We keep bumping into participants in a Care For Kids rally (there’s 40 4WDs taking part) and today, while having a drink at the Coen Hotel,  named the Exchange Hotel, but changed by the addition of an ‘S’ to the Sexchange Hotel, a group of trail bikers rode in.

They also had support vehicles and apparently, each paid $5000 for the privilege of eating dust from Cairns to the Cape, then flying back to Cairns.

One of the sentinel anthills in the Bramwell Junction
campground.

As John says, with most places in Australia, you visit, then drive on to somewhere else. With Cape York, you drive north to visit it . . . then you have to come south over the same fairly vile roads. One more day of those dirt roads and we’ll be back on the blacktop, all the way home.

We plan to go south to Cairns on the Bloomfield Track, and have already made arrangement for the Isuzu to be serviced next Monday in Cairns, and before that will source a new gel battery so our solar system feels happy again and stops sending out alarms. . . so that’s why it’s turned off.

Tonight we’re eating some of the barramundi we bought in Karumba. John is slicing it into small sections, coating them in rice flour, then cooking them gently in the sandwich toaster. We’ve certainly learnt to be innovative and compromise. All I have to do is make a salad!

Right at The Tip

It's certainly worth the drive.

We did it! We clambered to the northernmost part of Australia, stood beneath the sign, and were photographed by one of the many other people there. We’d battled over 34km of one of the worst roads we’d encountered, but finally reached Pajinka (The Tip) along with 2 4WD tour buses and a host of other vehicles.

Midway we started hearing a beeping sound which we finally identified when we stopped as an alarm from the power system. Basically, our solar charging system was sending out alarms all over the place and there was no power for anything.

After we’d done our rock clamber we hastened back to the campsite where a full investigation showed that one of the VERY expensive gel batteries used to power all the lights, fridges, water pump, toilet system in the motorhome had a crack in its top so unless we have 240V power plugged in, we have no power (unless we crank up the generator).

However, these things happen and we’ll manage until we get back to Cairns or Cooktown (whichever has a replacement battery).

Schoolkids swarming around the vehicle ahead of
us at the carwash.

Just after we returned to camp, some of the local schoolchildren came round touting for custom for a car wash they were holding at a nearby service station, trying to raise $50,000 to take 25 Year 7 kids to Brisbane on an excursion.

As the motorhome hadn’t had a bath for 7 weeks and was particularly filthy, we took it over there and they did a splendid job for $35.

Tomorrow we’ll set off south, hoping to make Cooktown in about 3 days.

Yesterday we were among 14 passengers on a small boat that took us to Thursday Island then on to Horn Island. We thoroughly enjoyed our day, even though the chap that showed us around TI (as the locals call it) was just a maxi taxi driver and like many taxi drivers, just wanted to air his opinions about the world and public servants!

We had enough free time to enjoy the town and its tropical atmosphere and soak up some of the history before we went across a channel to Horn Island, which is where the airport is, and the main maritime loading facility. Little ferries run between the two centres but of course we were in our own Cape York Adventures catamaran.

We had lunch there, then had time to enjoy the wonderful museum put together by a local woman, featuring a lot of the World War II history of the area, with a stunning collection of photos, as well as the general island group history.

The main part of Thursday Island town, from the hilltop fort
built by the British in the 1890s.

The boat trip took about 1.5 hours each way, with a slight deviation on the way over when the skipper, a young man whose Dad runs a local pearl farm, spotted seabirds diving on a school of mackerel, so he set two trolling lines from the back of the boat.  But the school moved away so he took in the lines eventually and we ploughed on through the many islands.

We’d already seen people using nets to catch bait fish (herring) off the Seisia jetty. The water was just teeming with these little fish and when we sit outside the van, right on our beachfront site, we see mackerel leaping all over the place.

Just on the sand behind us is a helicopter landing place where Cape York Helicopters have been taking tourists for scenic flights for some hours. They’ve now flown home to Thursday Island.

I’m writing this sitting outside watching the sunset and two of the local scrub turkeys have just wandered past. Yesterday one of the local horses wandered through the campground. While some places have stray dogs, Bamaga and Seisia seem to have stray horses. They live in groups by the road and all seem well-fed and happy.

Nearly at the top of Oz

New driver's window, all the way from Melbourne.

After six rather nice days in Weipa’s leafy campground we set out for points north. The new driver’s window had duly arrived by plane from Melbourne, via Cairns, and was fitted very efficiently.

After Weipa, we really did point our noses due north, spending a night at Bramwell Junction, a delightful basic campground that’s high on our list of favourites. Not only does it have trees and amenities but it also has enormous red anthills standing sentinel outside and scattered around the campground.

Quite a few campers intended leaving their camper-trailers and tents there and have a bash at the Old Telegraph Track. We preferred to drive the bypass route which got us to Seisia by lunchtime the next day, including a ferry crossing of the Jardine River. Even so, the corrugations were pretty vile in some places, while in others, the road was wonderful. There’s even a substantial bit of bitumen to give some respite.

Bamaga is the northernmost town on the cape but Seisia, a few km away on the western coast,  is incredibly popular and we’d heard it was difficult to get a place. Adding to the problem could be a Care For Kids rally which we’d already struck in Weipa, with about 40 vehicles, many of whom needed campsites.

Our beachfront site, complete with yellow sign,
warning of crocodiles.

However, we drove in, made inquiries at the holiday park, and a gorgeous islander with apparently only one tooth in his beaming smile, hopped on a quad bike and told us to follow him  . . . to a beachfront site with a big tree beside it. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven!

We have booked a tour of Thursday and Horn islands tomorrow and have to be at the jetty (about 2 minutes walk away) by 8.30am, returning around 4pm.

The next day, we’ll make the 30km drive north from Bamaga to actually stand at Cape York, so we know we’ve been to the most northerly point on the Australian mainland.

We’ve just discovered that there are 4 scrub turkeys running around the campground, even foraging at the top of the beach. And with a gecko chirping in the tree next to the motorhome, and a reputably 4-metre croc in the bay, we’ve got plenty of tropical wildlife at hand.

We're on Weipa time

While we’re still busy relaxing at Weipa, waiting for our new driver’s window to make its way from Melbourne, here are a couple of things we’ve learnt about this place:

1.     The Weipa currency is a carton of beer. That what a mine worker uses to repay someone who swaps a shift (though the only day that is allowed is on Christmas Day), along with any other favours. In fact, we saw a T-shirt in the newsagency that read: Weipa is a small drinking town with a fishing problem. Says it all, really.

2.     There’s such a thing as ‘Weipa time’. It’s ‘about an hour’. That’s a bit of a worry because that’s what the smash repairs bloke quoted John as the time needed to fit the new window . . . when it arrives.

3.     And then there’s ‘Weipa size’. Everything’s big, mate.

Once again, the campground has emptied out as people go south or north. We still have a couple of neighbours. They are all blokes having fishing holidays.

Our view when the campground thins out each
morning.

Three are from the Canberra area and their leader, a big bloke who lives at Bungendore and who used to have a trucking business in Queanbeyan, tells us he’s the ‘Kenny of Canberra’, obviously supplying all the portable loos needed on building sites and for public functions.

The other neighbours are two blokes and a dog. They arrived in an open-sided ute with a boat on top, dragged out a couple of small transparent tents. One man and a dog went into one, and the other had his tent to himself.

In the middle of the night, there developed what John termed the ‘toad’s chorus’ as all five (who had wandered up to the local bowling club and sank a few) started snoring.

Speaking of toads, we haven’t seen a single cane toad in all our travels. We’d heard they were all over the Gulf and the Cape but we haven’t spotted one yet. We DID hear them at Leichhardt River falls and I think I spotted some of their tadpoles in rock pools there.

One of the interesting ute-top campers in the park. The ute
just backs in under it, the legs swing up and attach somehow,
the top folds in neatly and off he goes.

When we were on the Tablelands and it was drizzling rain I was sure we'd see a few at night but the score remained at zero.

This afternoon, we’ve put our names down for a fish fry on the foreshore so we’ll take along our drinks and chairs and let someone else do the cooking.

Later:

The fish fry was excellent. We met a few other travellers and thoroughly enjoyed the local mackerel, battered and served with chips and salad. One youngish fellow was sitting on his own, didn’t even have a portable chair, like the rest of us, and was perched on one of the huge steel pipes laid horizontally to define the edge of the foreshore grass.

So we invited him to join us, sitting on the grass. It turned out he’s an ambulance paramedic from Brisbane who does an 8-day shift in Weipa, then flies home for his time off, then comes back for another 8 days. He was living in one of the cabins in the caravan park.

When he heard we were from Lismore he asked if we knew the Boyles. ‘As in Boyle Road, Goolmangar Boyles?’ I said.

And of course it was. Len and Carmel Boyle are my neighbours across the creek and this fellow, Scott Wilson, is married to Carmel’s niece. Small world!

Monday morning:

Great excitement in the camp today as this is when the weekly barge arrives from Cairns, laden with provisions for all the shops, particularly the supermarket. Since Friday it’s had no salad at all, its bread is all in the freezer and lots of other things are either missing from the shelves or low in numbers.

So we’ll go across and re-provision, keeping our fingers crossed that the window arrives by air from Cairns tomorrow and we can be on our way north by Wednesday at the latest.

Shattered glass and red dust

It had to happen, I suppose. There we were, tooling along, after an early morning start from Coen, on a fairly vile, dusty road north, when we saw a road train approaching.

John slowed almost to a standstill, and just as the road train passed, loaded with earthmoving equipment, something (a rock, or maybe a piece of the road train’s equipment) struck the driver’s window, and it shattered into a million pieces.

John was unhurt, although covered in pieces of glass, and I can tell you, he told God about it for a minute or so, then we cleaned the glass out of the cabin, made a temporary window out of black plastic and duct tape, but eventually discarded that in favour of just open air  . . . and dust . . . for the next 200 or so km until we reached Weipa.

We were so shocked and stunned we hadn’t even thought about taking photographs.

We checked into the delightful camping ground in Weipa, full of huge old trees, right on the foreshore, and went in search of assistance. Rather than order a new window to be available in Cairns, and spend the next week or so on our journey to the Cape and back fighting the dust, we found that Weipa Smash Repairs could get a new one from Melbourne in a few days.

It will arrive in Cairns on Monday, be here the next day, it will take an hour or so to fit, and we’ll be on the road again.

It’s no hardship to be here, as the shady campground is right next to a substantial shopping centre with a supermarket, butcher, hot bread shop, pharmacy, and even a hairdresser and beautician, where I have an appointment for a bit of maintenance.

John jokes that the only thing missing, as far as I’m concerned, is a shoe shop!

One of the giant trucks at Weipa.

We took the mine tour on our second day here (today) and it was a real eye opener. We knew the area is full of red dust, but you haven’t seen red dust until you see the bauxite mining operations. It is literally only a few metres under the topsoil, which is scraped off for later planting and restoration. Then the ore is just pushed up into piles, loaded into giant trucks (each tyre costs $10,000), taken to an unloading point where it is dumped, goes through a cleaning process, and within 11 minutes, is loaded into railway trucks, ready to be taken to the port area where it goes into bulk container ships, mostly for refinement into alumina at Gladstone, but some goes overseas as ore.

A truck being loaded with bauxite ore. That's the red
 dust of Weipa. 

The town is owned by Rio Tinto and just about everyone works for the company. The estuary is full of crocodiles and the bus driver told us five dogs had been taken in the past few weeks, so warned everyone against paddling in the water.

The forecast for the weekend is storms, so I’m actually quite pleased to be somewhere fairly civilised, rather than bush camping.

Lots of 4WDs and camper trailers are pulling in, wearing their covering of red dust like a badge of honour, and we just sit under our big tree and marvel at the wide variety available. There are lots of young families around us at present but the campground empties out pretty quickly each morning as people head north or south, filling up again after lunch. We’ll be the proper ‘old hands’ by the time we leave on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Halfway between Cairns and The Tip

We took a punt on the weather clearing further north from Lake Tinaroo . . . well, actually, we looked at the radar images for the peninsula on our iPhones . . . and left the miserable drizzle for much sunnier climes. It looked wonderful there, through the rain, so we know where to go another time when it’s finer.

John contemplates the steep scramble we'd had on
our way to the Aboriginal rock art galleries.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable run through the northern Atherton Tablelands and on to Lakelands, a wonderfully fertile flat area between mountains and hills that are quite lovely. We had sort of expected the whole run north to Cape York to be through fairly flat bushland, so we found those mountains a great surprise.

That night we plotted our route further north and thought we’d get to Musgrave for our next campsite. However, even after spending an hour or so at the Split Rock Aboriginal rock art galleries just south of Laura, we decided to keep going after Musgrave and finally pulled into Coen, recognised as halfway between Cairns and the tip of Cape York, around 3pm . . . an ideal time to find a place to stay.

The Coen pub, complete with extra consonant.

This is at the camping ground behind the local store, almost opposite the local pub, officially called the Exchange Hotel, but someone’s added an extra ‘S’ to the start of the name. It’s apparently a bit of a bloodhouse so we shan’t be giving it our patronage.

When we were at Lakelands, two elderly Victorian couples told us they were leaving their caravans there and making a dash for the Cape in one of their 4WDs, taking tents for accommodation. They’ve turned up here, in the store campground, shaded with giant old African mahogany trees, and are trying to put up tents they’ve never used before. One of the blokes has already begged a hammer from John as they have nothing with which to drive in the tent pegs!



The Morehead River beside which we lunched.

We’re sitting here having afternoon drinkies and trying not to laugh.

We’ve thawed some of the barramundi we bought at Karumba lat week and that’s destined for our evening meal.



We know we’re really in the tropical north now as it’s quite humid, and the vegetation along the sides of the road is featuring more and more grass trees and pandanus palms. The road north from Laura has been mostly gravel and in some places very, very corrugated, but nothing worse than we’ve driven over in western Queensland. Many of the creek and river crossing bear a warning about crocodiles, but the only animal life we’ve seen in our 300km today were cattle, the odd wallaby and kangaroo, some red-tailed black cockatoos, and a stately jabiru looking for fish in a river beside which we had lunch.

We're really in the Wet Tropics

It had to happen. After nearly five weeks of the dry, dusty Outback, as soon as we reached the Wet Tropics, it started to rain. It was amazing how in the course of just one day, the landscape changed so much, with bigger trees, no more open plains, and much closer settlement.

We've left behind these rocky bushland scenes.

Gone were the angular anthills of the Forsayth area. Now they were great bulbous affairs that looked like baby elephants grazing among the cattle on the sides of the road. On our way to Ravenshoe, the highest town in Queensland at 900+metres, we stopped at Innot Hot Springs.

The spring that bubbles into the creek is so hot in fact that when I paddled into the creek for a moment I lost feeling in my feet, then yelped and hightailed it out. Of course, I had gone in just where the spring enters from the other side, but further down, as the water cools to a pleasant warmth, young people were digging holes in the sand and sitting there with their feet in the warm water, enjoying the odd bottle of beer. That’s hedonism!



Millstream Falls near Ravenshoe.

Ravenshoe was misty when we settled into the caravan park by the creek (tall trees, turtles and platypus) but by this morning it was quite drizzly, whether heavy fog or low cloud, it was hard to tell.

It cleared a little as we drove north towards Atherton . . . the first ‘big’ town we’d seen in weeks, so we did all the necessary stuff, getting prescriptions filled, mailing birthday cards to grandsons and buying a truckload of groceries.

We are installed at the Lake Tinaroo Caravan Park, on the shores of said lake, but it has been drizzling ever since we arrived so we filled in the time this afternoon getting the washing done and dried and cooking a superb dinner of pork medallions centred with garlic butter.

We have our Cape York route all planned but are now watching this weather, which is bringing lots of rain to Cairns and the coastal areas and we are waiting to see if it moves into the peninsula, as the majority of our route is on dirt roads.

The next time we’ll have internet access will probably be at Weipa, in about 4-5 days . . . that’s if we get away tomorrow, which we may not.

It’s all vague – because we can be.