Cairns to Cape York

From Undarra we drove to Cairns, almost 300km and a world of difference away. From dry dusty scrub we entered wet rain forest. The tortuously steep and twisty road down the Gillies range would presumably provide spectacular views on a clear day, but on the first wet day we had experienced since Easter all we could see was mist and rain. It was one of the most difficult days we have had towing the van, and we were very glad to arrive in Cairns in one piece.

Over the last few months we have debated whether we would go up Cape York Peninsula, as the unsealed rough roads are unsuitable for our caravan. We decided that we couldn't really claim to have 'done the lap' without including this iconic area of Australia, and while we were in Darwin we booked a 10 day camping tour of the Cape. We chose a caravan park here in Cairns that also offered storage, so on the day our tour started (with a 6:15am pick-up) all we had to do was lock the van and leave it and the car to be put into storage by the park, they then put it back on site on the day we returned and plugged it into the power ready for us to come home to a cold beer.

It was quite exciting to be heading off on our first 'holiday' since we started caravanning. After the early pick up we were taken to the Cairns airport for a flight to Horn Island, in the Torres Strait. We had a look through the Horn Island museum, which had displays on Islander history and the role of the island in the Second World War, when it hosted a US air base and played a major role in the Battle of the Coral Sea. After a lovely buffet lunch we were whisked off for a tour of WWII sites, then bundled on the ferry to Thursday Island. At TI (as the locals call it) we had to almost run to make the ferry connection to the the town of Seisia on the mainland, where we were greeted by the bus driver and cook for our tour. It turned out that there were 10 of us altogether, plus the 2 staff members, which was a comfortable number in the 17 seater bus, allowing us to spread out enough not to have our day packs under our feet. Our fellow passengers were mostly a similar age to us, and we made a congenial group.

On our first full day of the trip we went up to the tip of Cape York, mainland Australia's northernmost point. It was quite a thrill to stand on this rocky point and know that all of Australia lay southwards. That afternoon we visited around some of the plane crash sites in the area, most of which were during WWII. The wreckage of many such crashes still lies scattered in the bush even after all this time. In the photo at right you can also see our bus.

From Seisia we headed southwards (there wasn't any other way to go really), the next 2 nights we spent at Twin Falls in a remote national park camp site. Toilets and a tap were provided, but no showers, but with such beautiful swimming conditions it didn't matter. Besides, if no-one showers then you can't smell each other!

Other nights were spent at camp sites attached to old telegraph or cattle stations, with one other 'shower free' night at Lakefield National Park. Slightly more luxurious was a night at Weipa, a remote bauxite mining town on the eastern shores of the gulf of Carpentaria. We did the 'optional extra' mine tour in Weipa, the bauxite is found in a thin layer only a metre or two below the ground, mining is done by stripping off the layer of top soil and digging up the bauxite below, the top soil is moved to rehabilitate a previously mined area so there is surprisingly little evidence of the mining left behind. Our last night of the tour was spent in comparative luxury at Cooktown, with clean hot showers and well lit toilets.

The road up Cape York is unsealed and, in places, very corrugated. There were times when it felt like our teeth would be rattled out of our heads, and the bus could barely manage 30 kmh. We had several river crossings, fording across at a steady pace. The bus only became bogged once, it took us several hours to dig it out of a deep patch of soft sand in, of all things, the car park of a picnic spot where we had stopped for lunch.

The cape was dryer than we had expected, mainly covered in the ubiquitous Australian scrub. We were a bit disappointed that we didn't see more wildlife, although there were occasional lizards and wallabies, and a snake, turtle or two. There were also several frogs, usually lurking in dark toilet blocks waiting to leap out and startle the unwary.

On the last day of our trip we drove down the Bloomfield Track from Cooktown back to Cairns. Unlike most of the previous landscape this was through the lush tropical rain forest that we associate with far north Queensland, although we were a little disappointed to find that the notorious crossing across the Bloomfield River has now been updated to a bridge. However the road itself was still pretty hairy, with hills of up to 30 degrees slope. After a ferry crossing across the Daintree River we came to Cape Tribulation, which is the end of the sealed road from Cairns. All of a sudden we were back in civilisation, with huge numbers of back packers and families on school holidays enjoying the beautiful golden beach.

Of course, one of the things about a 'camping holiday' is that you sleep in a tent. The tour company provided tents, inflatable mattresses and sleeping bags, and by the end of 10 days we were quite expert at setting up our sleeping quarters. However, the experience certainly made us appreciate the comparative luxury of our caravan!

Undara Lava Tubes

Undara is a private resort almost due north of Charters Towers. The road northwards, while sealed all the way, is at times only a single lane wide, so when another vehicle comes the other way you both have to get off the bitumen onto the dirt verge to pass. This is difficult enough when the the vehicle coming the other way is a 50 metre long road train, it becomes even more scary when the same sort of road train is going the same way and overtakes us. We were quite glad to reach the resort unscathed.

The Undara volcano erupted about 190,000 years ago, spewing rivers of lava across the land. The top of the lava cooled to form a seal, the hot interior continued to flow leaving hollow tubes behind. The lava tubes are now protected inside a national park, and are only accessible by doing a guided tour. We had booked a full day tour at the same time as we booked our caravan park site, we also gave ourselves an extra day to explore the other sights in the area.

The resort is very well set up with numerous well marked walking trails, we did several on both the afternoon we arrived and on our 'free' day. The scrubby landscape was pretty indistinguishable from many other places we have visited in Australia, but the walks and associated lookouts were interesting enough.

Caravan parks are generally on the outskirts of towns so it was a treat to be able to walk to the on-site restaurant for dinner. We both indulged in very 'Australian' meals, with John having crocodile fillets while Wendy had the tasting plate of crocodile, emu and kangaroo. The meals were excellent, and very reasonably priced given the isolation of the resort.

Of course, the reason for going to Undara is to experience the lava tubes. Our full day tour visited 7 different tubes, plus provided a walk around one of the many volcano craters in the national parks. The tubes are incredible, you can really picture the hot molten rock pouring down inside, at speeds up to 20 kmh. Iron and calcium have created colourful patterns on the walls, and bats huddle overhead. While the tubes superficially resemble limestone caves, the smooth walls and even shapes are quite different to a typical cave formation. There are no stalactites or stalagmites, although some dripping molten rock has formed 'lavacles' that superficially resemble the more familiar limestone formations. The full day tour visited all the tubes that are open to the public, although some of them involved quite heavy duty scrambling over fallen rocks to access. We also had to wade through freezing knee high water in one of the tubes, apparently this is the first time in at least 70 years that water is still present this late in the season, the flooding and heavy wet season just past is unprecedented in living memory. The photo of John at right shows only ankle high water, but already you might be able to see his toes curling up in the cold!

All in all we had a fantastic time at Undara, it is an experience unlike any other available in Australia, and virtually anywhere in the world.

Richmond - Hughenden - Charters Towers

We've been moving due east, through dinosaur country. We only stopped one night at Richmond, doing the town heritage walk in the evening after we arrived, and visiting Kronosaurus Korner, a fossil information and display centre, the next morning before we moved on. Richmond is sited on what was the floor of an ancient sea, and the flat land around is noted for many fossil finds. Most of the fossils are sea animals, including the Richmond Pliosaur, Australian ichthyosaur and Kronosaurus Queenslandicus. There is also a remarkably well preserved fossil of the Minmi, which must have been washed into the sea after it had died. The fossil even included the skin of the little creature, so they can tell exactly what it looked like. The picture at left shows a recreation of the minmi. Kronosaurus Korner was a very well set up museum, with interesting displays and heaps of information. It certainly justified stopping off in this town in the middle of Queensland.

From Richmond we headed to Hughenden for a couple of nights. The Hughenden area was on the shores of the same ancient sea, and is also rich in fossils. They have claimed the Muttaburrasaurus, first found a couple of hundred kilometres further south at Muttaburra, as their own, and have replicas of both the fossil skeleton and the recreated dinosaur on show in town. The Fossil Corner exhibition wasn't nearly as sophisticated as Kronosaurus Korner in Richmond, but at $5 each we felt we got our money's worth.

Hughenden has put quite a lot of effort into attracting visitors to town and there is quite a bit to see. Apart from 'Mutt' shown above, there are quite a few other sculptures in town, most made from old windmill or tractor parts. Quite a few, but not all, of these have a dinosaur theme. Just south of town there is a small hill (Mt Walker) with lookouts giving a panoramic 360 degree view of the flat plains around the town. We also did a couple of 4-wd 'scenic drives', neither of which was particularly scenic or really needed a 4-wd to complete. However, they gave us another view of this dry pastoral landscape.

Apart from exploring all things dinosaur related, we also spent half a day going to Porcupine Gorge, a deep chasm gouged into the flat plains about 60 km north of Hughenden. The drawback of walking down into a gorge is that the hard bit comes at the end when you have to climb back up again, and with the rather straggly native vegetation not providing much shade it was rather a hot effort, but plenty of water and taking our time allowed us to make it. The creek at the bottom of the gorge is still flowing surprisingly well, given it is still the dry season here, and made a nice place to sit beside and eat the fruit we had brought. The rock formation shown in the photo is known as pyramid rock, for obvious reasons.

Another 250km drive further east brought us to Charters Towers, which started life as a gold rush town in 1872. It is still a prosperous looking service centre for the surrounding pastoral properties, with many lovely old buildings remaining from the gold rush days. We did the history walk around town, the highlight of which would have to be the restored Stock Exchange Arcade. The trading was done from the balcony pictured, with the masses below eagerly bidding up the price of shares in the various 'sure thing' mines on offer. As in other frontier towns, fortunes were made and lost quickly, and there were some interesting stories told on the information panels and displays in the arcade. We also went up the local lookout - more flat plains - and had a game of golf.

Back to Mt Isa

After leaving Kakadu we spent a couple of long days driving through the Northern Territory back to Queensland, 658 km the first day and 582 the second. We stopped at Katherine on the first day to stock up on supplies as there was no shopping at Mary River Roadhouse, and once we got into Queensland we lost half an hour on the clock. Most of the second day's drive was due east across the Barkly Tablelands, fighting a headwind the entire way. With the caravan providing drag we could just about see the fuel gauge dropping! After all that we still had another couple of hundred km to go on the third day to get back to Mt Isa.

Needless to say once we got to Mt Isa we stopped for a rest for a couple of days. Last time we were here we did most of the attractions on offer, but we still found enough to occupy ourselves. We picked up a brochure from the visitor centre for a tourist drive around some old mine towns, and had a lovely day exploring. The trail started about 60km from Mt Isa, and on the way we visited the remains of Mary Kathleen, the town attached to the uranium mine. This was active from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, at which time the mine was closed down and all buildings in the town sold off. All that remains now are concrete slabs on well laid out streets, many still with kerbing intact.

Just past Mary Kathleen we turned off the highway onto a dirt road, to the ghost towns of Bulonga, Ballara and Hightville. Actually, the term 'ghost town' implies a lot more than is really there, which is barely even as much as at the Mary Kathleen site. Ballara, which during the First World War was the rail head for shipping all the local copper production to the east coast and boasted a population of over 1,000, can now only be identified by the remains of the rail siding, with no other ruins remaining at all. Bulonga still had a few concrete foundations in the bush, the weir damming the local river to supply water to the mine and township was the only relic surviving in reasonable condition.

The track to the ruins of Hightville, and the remains of the railway tunnel nearby, was very narrow and rough, even in 4wd we never got out of second gear, and on at least one of the (dry) creek crossings we needed to engage low transmission just to get up the other side. It certainly

gave the Patrol a work-out! The trail also visited Fountain Springs, which must have been a very welcome permanent water supply in the arid landscape. The whole area was abandoned after the First World War when copper prices dropped, although some hardy prospectors are still poking around hoping to strike it rich.

On our other day in Mt Isa we (naturally) had a game of golf. We also stocked up on supplies ready to continue our journey across the outback towards the coast.

Kakadu South

When we were in the Northern Territory 2 years ago we spent a week at the World Heritage Listed Kakadu National Park. We based ourselves at Jabiru, the only township inside the park and explored all the central and northern parts. However with the southern entrance 150km from Jabiru we didn't get to see the southernmost attractions.

We decided to remedy that situation on our way back southwards, and have spent the last few days staying at the Mary River Roadhouse, just outside the southern entrance to Kakadu. Last time we were at Kakadu we were surprised that there was no entrance fee, with such a huge area to manage we expected there would have been some element of 'user pays'. Well the government has well and truly rectified that oversight - it now costs $25 per person for a 2 week park entrance pass. Being good citizens we duly bought a pass each at the roadhouse before setting off into the park, but there was no roadblock at the entrance and in the 2 days we spent in the park no-one looked at all interested in checking whether we had paid, so we suspect that a lot of the young tourist/backpacker crowd would probably not pay.

Our first stop was Gunlom, a big pool at the base of a waterfall. In the wet season it would undoubtedly be spectacular, this deep in the dry it is still flowing but with much diminished force. A strenuous half hour climb took us to the top of the waterfall, where the water flows through a series of beautiful rock pools before tumbling over the edge of the cliff. The last pool outlined against the horizon is a truly spectacular sight. We didn't do any swimming, but most visitors were taking the plunge (although not literally over the waterfall), it certainly looked inviting after the hard walk up.

We then did several walks at Yurmikmik. With no swimming on offer very few people visit this area, so we had it virtually to ourselves.

On the second day we did a lovely creekside walk at Maguk. Once again this walk ended in a plunge pool at the base of a waterfall, and many people were taking a dip, despite the signs warning that there may be crocodiles in the area. Admittedly, the local information did say that the rangers cleared out the crocodiles at the beginning of each dry season, so it should be safe, but it also said that crocodiles could possibly move in undetected at any time. Presumably it is a matter of all care but, hey, we warned you, so no responsibility.

We also did shortish walks at Gungurul and Bukbukluk, each ending in a lookout over the seemingly endless scrub that makes up the vast majority of the Kakadu area. All in all, we're satisfied that we've ticked off all the attractions that this famous park offers, although it would be interesting to come back in the wet season to see the rivers and waterfalls in full flood.