OK – yes, I have been very slow at updating the blog. My
apologies everyone! We went without phone reception for ages out west, then
we’ve been busy having adventures. However, it’s now time to begin our return
journey home for Christmas, so I better update it before I need to add the
south-ward escapades!!
Well the heat so far has sometimes been intense, but woah....
we must have crossed some other invisible line on the highway as we were
heading to our northernmost point, because all of a sudden we were in the
extremely steamy tropics. By the time we had set up the van at Cooktown, Conrad
and I were both drenched in sweat and feeling like we’d been breathing through
a hot sock for the last hour or so. It just didn’t let up the whole time we
were here. When you got to the coast, I mean right on the water, it became
somewhat bearable, but the humidity was off the chart to anything we had
experienced so far. One upshot of this time of year is the tropical fruit. The
park we stayed at was overflowing with hundreds of ripe mangoes... yum!
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| The girls hanging out with the Cap'n. |
At the start of the journey, I really wanted to go all the
way to the top of Australia. You know, to stand at the little sign that said
“you are standing at the northernmost point of Australia”. That’s before I
found out that Cape York is a massive, savage, barely inhabited, steamy mud
track that doesn’t accommodate a caravan and barely accommodates humans! (slight
exaggeration). So I compromised and said we really need to get to Cooktown at
least. The girls had been learning about Captain Cook and his adventures and I
thought this area would really cement some of that information. It sure did! We
started with Captain Cook lookout. This is situated at the head of the
Endeavour River, where Cook limped in with his busted ship all those years ago.
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The actual mouth of the Endeavour River, now marked by a look-out
and lighthouse, haven't really changed too much since James saw it all those years ago. |
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| Except for one little, smiley critter. |
Next on the historical trek, was the Captain James Cook
Museum. These guys have an ingenious artefact finding sheet for kids that makes
the museum like a game. Stuff like “somewhere in the Endeavour gallery is a
golden key salvaged from the..... can you find it?”. I was also fascinated by
the incredible building that housed the museum. Originally a convent, this
stunning 19th century building had soaring ceilings, beautiful
moldings and amazing stories.
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| The Captain Cook Museum housed in the beautiful old Convent building. |
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Scale model of the Endeavour. I loved the quote by Charles Darwin on the wall near it...
"The voyage of Captain Cook added a hemisphere to the world". |
While visiting the Captain Cook memorial in the foreshore
park and sitting on one of the Endeavour canons, we came across the “Musical Ship”. If I hadn’t already seen The
Musical Fence, I would have been gob-smacked, as it was I was still pretty blown
away. This is an impressive collection of recycled poly-pipe, stainless steel
and aluminium that have been fashioned into actual tuned instruments in a ship sculpture. There’s marimbas, xylophones, chimes and even a doof doof
(base drum!).
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| Cooktown's Musical Ship. |
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| Check out the poly pipe marimba around the stern. |
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| The three musketeers go ballistic. |
Perhaps the most amazing sight in Cooktown was our real honest-to-goodness,
right-in-front-of-us sighting of a crocodile swimming along the foreshore. Even
though you see the croc signs everywhere, and we haven’t even stuck a toe in
the water up here, it’s still quite a shock to see a real life specimen coast by. We all scrambled to get our cameras out, but only managed to get him going back under.
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| No that's not a log kids. |
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| The other footpath got eaten! |
While we still had that Steve Irwin feeling, we decided to
go exploring down a dirt road to see Finch Bay. Minus the croc tracks, this was like a scene
out of that movie Castaway. Something tells me that Tom Hanks (or Wilson for
that matter) mightn’t have made it 4 years here!
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This is the pretty angle out to sea, not the
croc-infested swampy bit behind us. |
Once you got away from the pretty coast road, it really did
feel like we were heading back to the outback on the trip to and from Cooktown.
There were long stretches of red dirt-lined road and some massive ant hills.
The other incredible sight we encountered on this stretch, was Black Mountain.
As you drive down the Mulligan Highway, you notice these funny coloured
mountains emerge from the horizon. As you get closer you realise they are made
up of massive black granite boulders, some the size of small houses, all piled
on top of one another!!
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| That whole of black mountain is made up of those rocks in front. |
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Is that a sumo farmer? ...the abominable snowman? No just a
freakishly huge, man-shaped ant hill!! |
