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.
