We are now on the fringes of civilisation in Cooktown, data up here is SLOW so this will be a picture-less entry. As we are taking the inland route back to Brisbane there may not be any blogs for the next few days depending on connection speed.
Three days in a row we have got up before our normal time, I hope this isn’t habit forming! After breakfast we headed out to a craft store, Lyn was desperately trying to find a quilt store, but there wasn’t one to be found. We arrived at the store and Lyn was even more despondent when we saw it, not a good start to the day. After 60 seconds in the store her mood changed and her credit card started quivering in her purse. She had found her quilt store.
About an hour later we emerged from the store with plenty of goodies for Lyn. Next stop was up the coast to Cape Tribulation where there was a rain forest zip-line activity. The route to the Cape required a ferry crossing over one of the rivers. We checked with the ticket guy as to the routing from Cape Tribulation up to Cooktown. It turned out that a 35km section of the road was gravel with steep inclines and many tight curves. A 4WD vehicle was strongly recommended. We decided to buy a return trip on the ferry and take the easier route, rental car companies aren’t amused when you go off roading with their vehicles. At Cape Tribulation we asked about the zip-lining, unfortunately the whole package would take 2.5 hours. This, coupled with the fact we now had about 200km extra to travel to our destination would make it a very late arrival. Unfortunately the zip-lining was abandoned. We had a late lunch, and while sitting on the patio we heard quite a commotion coming from the trees, initially we saw nothing but saw that the people on the next table had spotted something. Up at the top of the tree was a colony of large bats hanging from the branches. One of the bats flew off, and I’d guess at the wingspan as being close to 3 feet.
Although we had to backtrack quiet a way, the scenery made it worthwhile. Much of the trip was right along the coast with miles of unused sandy beaches.
Once we started to head north towards Cooktown the scenery changed, there was hardly any sign of human habitation, cows were free to roam across the road causing us to stop a few times and there were “beware of kangaroo” signs every where, unfortunately there were none to be seen. We had a couple of small mountain ranges to cross with associated hairpins which was fun! We finally made it into Cooktown around 1830.