triplog

I’ve spent the last few days in limbo, otherwise known as the Gold Coast. After hanging out in Burleigh on Sunday night, I’d headed further south, all the way to Tugun (about two suburbs away), when I got a call from Keenan - I’d thought he was living somewhere just south of the border, but turns out he was one suburb back the way I’d just come, in Palm Beach. So we hung out for beers and dinner at the local surf club on Monday night - it was good to catch up, we figured out the last time we’d seen each other was around 5 years ago - then on Tuesday morning I bid him farewell and was all set to head south into NSW.

I made it as far as Tweed Heads, when the clutch on the troopy decided to give up the ghost - it had been threatening a caper like this for a while. So off I went to Keenans mechanic, Roger, where I was told I couldn’t the car back until Friday. Keenan kindly put up with me as a house guest for the rest of the week (I owe you, mate) while I waited. And waited. With no surf.

Anyway, this afternoon I finally got reunited with troopy (and dis-united from over a grand), and hit the road south. I intended to drive through Byron Bay, just to see what had changed, and then keep going further south until dark… but lo and behold, as soon as Main Beach hove into view, those plans went out the window. There was surf. My home state (sorry Jane!) had laid out the welcome mat.

I managed to keep it together long enough to snap off the pictures above, then bolted for the water. It was offshore, warm water, head high and getting glassier with each passing minute. Oh yeah…

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.

Our first stop in Queensland was Lawn Hill National Park, home of Lawn Hill Gorge; a real, live, swim-able, canoe-able oasis in the middle of a lot of croc country. For a small donation to the Royal Flying Doctors, you can hire inflated inner tubes to float around in, which became the perfect way for us to explore the gorge with Matt and Bec despite only having one canoe - simply throw a rope out the back and tow.

We camped at Daly Waters pub last night - its about 275kms south of Katherine. Jane and I got here late in the evening (again), we stopped off at the Katherine swimming pool for Jane to swim some laps and I went for a skate at what was a pretty well built skate bowl (but full of rubbish and leaf litter).

Daly Waters is a bit of an Aussie pub institution - established by the Pearce family in the 1920s as a rest stop for travellers on the north/south route, it experienced a boom in the 1930s when it actually became an international airport - it was used as a refuelling depot for international flights heading for the east coast via Singapore. During WWII it became an Allied airbase and was used as a staging post for American bombers. Post-WWII it entered a bit of a decline before re-emerging on the tourist and truckie routes as a nice rest spot - having cold beer on tap can’t hurt either. The current pub was built in 1930 and is now heritage listed.

The photo above shows a flock of rainbow lorikeets having a shower in the spray from the sprinkler - they were hilarious, all screeching when the sprinkler passed over them, then flying off into the trees to shake themselves off, before coming back for another round.