triplog

Does it get any better?

… and I surfed in boardies. Sorry, Jane.

I ended up staying the night in Byron, but the pulse of swell from the afternoon before didn’t hang around until morning. So I started making my way south, stopping in to check first Tallows (nothing doing - still some size, but very messy) and then Broken Head - bingo! It looked pretty good when I first got there so I went out for a wave, but it rapidly deteriorated - mainly closeouts.

I’m still bludging around the Sunshine coast, waiting for this weather to clear and the surf to do something. Anything. Just not incessant howling onshore slop (plus ça change, eh?).

On the other hand, they do have some fine skate-parks here. Every little beach surf club/foreshore area seems to have one - the photo above is of the one at Peregian Beach, south of Noosa heading towards Coolum - and yesterday the rain actually cleared (but no luck with the wind or swell), so they stopped resembling half-drained kiddies swimming pools.

I ended up cruising south past Coolum and Maroochydore looking for a board shop (more on that later), and ended up spending a large chunk of the afternoon skating the Alexander Headland park (I’ve put a link in to it on a Google map, was hoping for a ’street view’ but they don’t seem to have it for this area…). It’s a nice big open park, a bit older than some of the other ones around here, and accordingly the concrete transitions are a bit rougher. Some good skaters here too, and a fair crew of sullen-looking emo/stoner skate kids hanging out across the road at the local skate shop. Ah, the derelict teenage years.

Last week we spent in luxury - we rented a holiday house at Cow Bay in the Daintree with Matt, Bec, and Lesley and, Matts sister and her partner flew up for a few days too. The house was massive, an open-plan all timber construction surrounded by lush vegetation and wildlife. It also had a pool table and swimming pool, and about a million cosy nooks, chairs or hammocks to just relax and read in.

A bit of a catch-up is probably in order here… after Paluma Range National Park, we headed back to the coast and north to Mission Beach, a small touristy town near Dunk Island. We didn’t stay in Mission Beach itself, rather at the next bay along, called Bingil Bay, in a small council-run park right on the beach. That’s where we caught up with Matt and Bec again, after having split paths with them before Townsville. They headed further north to Cairns the next day, while we stayed on for 4 days there.

After Bingil Bay we cruised north to Cairns, where we had to pick up Lesley (Jane’s mum, who’s spending a couple of weeks traveling with us) - but rather than stay in Cairns itself, we headed about 20 minutes further north to Palm Cove. Palm Cove is a ritzy tourist town, full of resorts, and holiday units, but there is a small council run campground right in the northern corner, on the beach. We caught up with Matt and Bec again here. While I’m on about Palm Cove, I need to mention the food - there’s some world class restaurants here, including Nu Nu, which got the Gourmet Traveller Regional Restaurant of the Year 2008 gong. We’d stopped here for crab sandwiches 3+ years ago, when we flew up for a long weekend, and were blown away by the place… good to see it seems to only have gotten better in the interim.

From Palm Cove (with Lesley safely arrived) we left Matt and Bec at Palm Cove and headed further north, up the coast via Port Douglas (just detoured in for a quick look) and across the Daintree River on the ferry. We cruised through the rainforest, and headed up as far as Cape Tribulation, where we set up camp for 2 nights in the Jungle Lodge - mainly cabins, but a few really nice campsites in the rainforest. The photos above are from Myall Beach at Cape Trib (south of the cape).

We got into Cooktown late yesterday afternoon, after a pretty tiring day’s travel… we’d done the Bloomfield Track, which is a 4WD track through the Daintree from Cape Trib up to Cooktown - not far, but hard on the car, with the steepest hills I’ve ever seen, and the trailer like a dead weight trying to pull us back down. There’s a couple of river crossings too, nothing too bad unless you’re attempting it in a Ford Falcon - we got to one crossing to find a queue backed up and a bunch of people trying to push the Ford out of the river on the other side. They’d made it most of the way, then hit a submerged rock, stalled, and presumably drowned it trying to restart in the water. I jumped in and helped push - the back of the car had copped a hammering from everyone pushing too - there’s nowhere solid to push, as the bumper is fibreglass and the boot panels really flimsy, so they had panel damage and a broken tail-light too, not to mention whatever the rocks had done to the undercarriage. Despite the car being cactus, they seemed pretty casual and cheerful about it all.

At the end of the Bloomfield Track, just before it joins up with the main highway near Cooktown is Helenvale, a tiny community that is home to the historic Lions Den Hotel, a cool old pub in the spirit of the Daly Waters pub in the NT. We’d had a night up here the last time we were up this way, so stopped off for lunch and a beer, before heading in to Cooktown.