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!

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.

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 19^th century building had soaring ceilings, beautiful moldings and amazing stories.

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!).

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.

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!

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!!