Greetings everyone. Just a short update. We reached the northernmost tip of Australia,
and also did our trip to Thursday and Horn Islands.
Thursday and Horn Islands
was an interesting day. Our tour boat
was slightly delayed, as we had to take in tow a small tinny that had broken
down about half an hour out of Thursday Island.
The island tour was a bit thin– we saw the various suburbs, the sewage
treatment works, the TAFE, the cemetery, and the Green Hill Fort. The fort was the only really interesting
site. It was built to defend Australia
during the Russian Japanese war and later used during the First and Second
World Wars. It is now abandoned and has
a small museum, which is only open occasionally. The views over Thursday Island and Torres
Strait from the hill, however, are lovely.
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| Green Hill Fort Thursday Island |
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| View of Torres Strait from Green Hill Fort |
The GabTitui Cultural
Centre near the dock was the highlight of our visit. It has a lot of excellently displayed cultural
and historical information as well as an art gallery of Torres Strait Islander art
– some of which is very good. They had
some beautiful linoprints for sale. I am sorry that we didn’t really have the
time to look at them properly. And as we don’t have a house anymore we really
don’t have anywhere to put them and not much room for anything more in the
truck and camper either.
After lunch we went to Horn
Island and the museum which is housed in a hotel. Lots of stuff, some interesting, some junk,
but really in need of a professional curator and some judicious editing of the
collection. Islander carvings of wood
and pearl shell and the masks were good;
the paintings amateur. Hundreds
of photos, often two or three versions of the same thing, from World War Two
and early days of Thursday Island. Some
interesting and ususual documentation from Japanese who fought in the area and
bombed Horn Island, and some later reconcilitation meetings.
The tip of Cape York was a
bit of an anti-climax as it is quite a tourist spot and there are heaps of people
coming and going, despite the rough and badly corrugated road. We had lunch
there, and then camped at Somerset Beach, which was a lovely little campground
not too far from the tip. There was an
aboriginal art site in a cave at the south end of the beach, only accessible at
low tide. We heard tiny squeaks while we
were there, and realized that it was also the home of little bats. They packed themselves into tiny crevices to
sleep. I don’t know how they stood it as
it was over 35 degrees C, they had fur
coats and were heaped on top of each other.
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| Bill being shy at "The Tip" |
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| The Tip |
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| Bats at Somerset Beach |
Our next big venture was
our trip back to Cairns via the Trinity Bay, a freighter that took us and our
vehicle back to Cairns. It was a bit
nerve wracking watching the camper being craned into (and later out of) the
hold, but all went well. We spent a
restful two days sailing back to Cairns and seeing some of the Cape from the
water.
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| Trinity Bay Freighter, Seisia Dock, Cape York |
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| Loading the Truck and Camper into the hold by crane |
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| Sunrise from freighter on way to Cairns |
In Cairns, we caught up
with friends Gaynor and Ashley who had kindly stored our bicycles and some
extra gear while we travelled up the cape.
We stayed in Port Douglas for a week, and actually got to swim in the
ocean again as they have a patrolled beach (I guess the lifesavers watch out
for crocodiles) and it wasn’t stinger season yet.
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| Arrival at Cairns by sea |
The best part of Port
Douglas, and the reason I started this blog, was a day trip to snorkel on the
outer Great Barrier Reef. We had a
fantastic day snorkelling at 3 different sites on Opal Reef, and I took lots of
pictures, a small selection of which appear below. This was one of the true highlights of our
trip for me, and something I never tire of.
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| Sweet Lips, and very cute too |
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| Staghorn Coral |
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| Plate Coral |
We have since moved south
and stopped yesterday at Wallaman Falls, the highest waterfall in the southern
hemisphere, and a beautiful spot. We are
now camped at a caravan park in Rollingstone, north of Townsville. Both Bill and I have the flu and are pretty
miserable, so we are sitting here doing nothing until we recover a bit. Hopefully, the warm sun and beachfront here
will speed recovery and we will be on our way south again in a couple of days.
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| Wallaman Falls |
