Back on the Road

Our New Home

Since our last post, we travelled via charter plane from Darnley Island in the Torres Straits to Bamaga on the tip. We were too busy to do the tip but got very close with a nearly-night drive through the forests. Just beautiful and lots of wildlife including a quoll. From Bamaga we travelled by boat to Thursday Island and then the next day to Horn island and Cairns. Stayed in Cairns Onight ( I think - can't really remember) and then back to Bris. Thanks Drew for collecting all our stuff from the barge and putting it in the shed.

We had three days at home. Mum was in hospital again and we had to freak out poor old Scott the housesitter by turning up in a great hailstorm when the power was out. It was all quite confusing really. Then we flew to Nauru for a week. One night at home to check up on Dad's eye operation. Thanks Jeff for stepping in while I was flying from Honiara.

Then believe it or not we stayed home for 20 hours before flying to Cairns and then getting our 4wd camper and driving to Lockhart River. Lockhart is 830 K from Cairns.

This trip, we are driving to avoid the bad weather issues at Lockhart (for some reason pilots don't like landing on mountains in the fog) and to make sure we get enough time at Pormpuraaw.

We have a delightful camper (cook outside) which currently has a 10 laptop network, next G system and lots of cables stuffed in the storage boxes. We have a freezer for food and an esky and have done really well for delicious dinners. The camping and camp spots have been outstanding.

Tough roads and dry creek beds make the driving interesting,
though the road was in better condition than we thought and made good time.

We had a delightful camp on the first weekend, enjoying veges on the coals. Its been a while since the last camp. We had to learn to put things in the same place, a bit of a trap in a camper full of laptops. We woke up to kangaroos feeding just outside the van and a baby kookaburra amusing us.

The roads are mostly dirt up here. The road through the centre of cape York and out to Lockhart is mostly red dirt. It certainly makes finding the road easy. We took the GPS which was a hoot. It could find the communities we were going to, but thought we were either on unnamed roads, off the road or travelling cross country. We stopped at Archer River RoadHouse and Paul found an old environmental days mate John, who was camping out counting possums. Amazing who you meet. he was headed in towards Lockhart to the Wenlock.



I lost count of the rivers we had to cross ( no bridges Sue) and the truck seemed to go really well through them. The country was really spectacular, especially towards Iron Range. the heathlands style vegetation was a treat, though at this tie of year the flowering is nearly over. We did stop and get a short walk in to do some photography.






So we eventually found Lockhart, only to find that we had to reassemble the training centre computers network again and clean up after some builders put down a floor. Just what we needed after 2 days of travelling. It was okay. Paul fiddled about with the network to make it talk to the Internet and we began on time for day 1 of 4 days in Lockhart River.