Author: Mr A
Location: Mount Surprise to Cobbold Gorge Village
Tuesday: Some days just don’t got to plan – and this was one of them. It started well with a great drive across the dry scherophyll forest, or savannah lands, as they are commonly called. This region makes up for a fifth of the total land area of Australia, it’s huge. We turned off the main highway at a small settlement called Georgetown, and headed into the remote area we would be staying for the next 3 days, at a cattle station turned tourist destination called Cobbold Gorge.
The road was a little rough, unsealed and corrugated in places, but I was taking it very steady as usual, and had pumped up the air bags this morning so the van was sitting nice and high, tyres down to 25psi. However, we finally arrived at the property to see a pair of our shocks hanging down on one side.
I then spent a very stressful afternoon trying to figure out with Zone and their suspension supplier (both who were super helpful) what had gone wrong and how we would get it fixed in this remote location.
The summary is, in case you are a Zoner, and you really want to avoid being in this situation, we had been told where to measure the ride height by the guys who supply the components, but Zone gave us a measure that would test the ride height in a different spot. A bit of miscommunication, combined with our lack of experience and know-how, and you have a shock that over-extended and came apart, shearing off the bracket that holds them as well, all because the ride height was too high. We had no idea that there was any risk in it being too high, and thought we had them set right for rough road travel, anyway.
Some parts are being sent from Brisbane, some from Cairns, arrival time anyone’s guess, certainly the freight companies won’t pin themselves down to a day. Looks like we might be getting to know this region really well.
Wednesday: We had booked on a tour of the property today, trying to get back on course to our plan for this stay. Cobbold Gorge has become a real magnet for tourism, hosting over 11,000 people last year, the big drawcard being a narrow, winding, deep gorge that was only recently discovered by settlers here in the 1960s.
We started the tour though with a short bushwalk, with a guide who talked us though the local flora and fauna, with a focus on the many different uses to which aborigines put the trees and shrubs. He explained how they used them to treat everything from bruises, rashes, diarrhoea and cuts, to avoiding pregnancies in lean years. For bush tucker there were grapes, plum type fruits, all sorts of berries with concentrations of vitamins we humans need.
We saw the striking bloodwood tree oozing its red sap, the soap tree that we had tested up in Cooktown and produced a beautifully scented wash, it was so fascinating.
Everywhere our untrained eyes looked we just saw shades of green and odd looking flowers or berries. Mick saw breakfast, lunch, dinner and a full medicine cabinet.
We climbed up high on the walls of the gorge and admired the views from above, imaginations going wild with the shapes of the rocks. Can you spot the crocodile?
We then climbed into the boats and set off along the gorge. Mick explained about the geology that had formed this narrow gorge, with the layers of sandstone washed down through the inland sea being cracked open, and we were in one of those cracks. If you are a geologist please excuse me, but that was my drift.
Over 9 metres deep under the water, and only a few metres wide, it was a quite something to drift though, I wish though we had been allowed to wander through on our own in the packrafts…they assured us the crocs are only of the freshwater variety!
Tourism here has brought many economic and social benefits for the local communities that were really struggling through drought and depressed cattle prices. It’s great to see entrepreneurs doing this out here. Small shops, pubs, caravan parks, and servos (petrol stations) all benefiting. Mick even said “people are taking more care of their yards now”. A returning sense of pride…awesome.
INTERJECTION FROM MRS A
As Mark suggested the other day, there is always the chance of our plans being waylaid, and this evening we got some very sad news from the UK which has done just that. Mark’s mum, Jill, passed away peacefully in her sleep on Monday night.
Our plans to continue west will have to be put on hold, as Mr A will need to catch a flight to London for the funeral. Plans for that will depend on the delivery of the new shocks for our caravan to Georgetown, in the middle of the Savannah…we hope that might be Friday, but in reality, who knows…it looks like the east coast of Australia might see us again sooner than we thought…
Our washing machine has not worked since the end of May, so we have been pretty tied to campground washers – of variable quality. Our first task was to get a sack of washing done, including our sheets and towels. Sadly, one of the machines did not spin, and our washing came out absolutely sopping wet (it took some pieces three days to dry!). So frustrating, and not helped by the continuing showery weather.
It wasn’t long after that our friends Bob and Ann Gadd arrived to join us for lunch. We last saw them down in Adelaide where they live during the warmer months – this time of year they are found in their apartment in Port Douglas, escaping the cool South Australian winter. We ambled along the street, catching up on news and found a cafe for lunch. Lots of laughs were had, stories told, and maps looked at to help us plan for our next few weeks.
After saying farewell to them, we returned to the Zone to find more Zoners were in town!
The market was great too. Alongside the stalls of fresh-from-the-farm vegetables and herbs were bakers, jewellers, artists (including musicians, painters, woodworkers, ceramic workers and potters), massage therapists, plants of all varieties, flowers and even fertilised eggs, chicks and chickens for sale. It all felt very authentically country.
Again, we didn’t get too far before Tassie decided it was time to return to the Zone. She always amazes me with her courage – as a 14 year old predominantly indoor/garden cat, she had not really travelled much before last September, but now she’s been right across Australia. She always knows where the safe Zone is, and keeps her wits about her, even when being dive bombed by birds…they don’t seem to understand she’s a lover not a catcher!
There are plenty of birds here. We have spotted pale yellow robins, firetails, finches galore, and lovely purple and green fruit doves feeding on the mandarins on and below the tree beside where we are camped. The little black and white Willy Wagtail is the feisty one, always flying at Tassie and frightening her back indoors. I guess he’s met some hungrier cats in his lifetime.
Soon the cheese was calling, and off we went to the farm where Mr A tried some cheese and purchased a delicious (according to him) blue.
From here we drove a short way to another little national park – home to the Curtain Fig. This tree is a survivor in a small patch of remaining rainforest which was saved from the saw in the 1800s by the rocky surface, not ideal for grazing. 
It is protected by a raised boardwalk, and pretty magnificent.
Mareeba didn’t tempt us in to town, and it had a very uninspiring campsite as well, so after the using the time to clean sheets, clothes, truck and Zone we decided to head off to Atherton, the main town up here on the tablelands.
Moving on, we called in at our first fruit and veggie shop on the tablelands. If you’re not au fait with the area then you should know it is famous for its basalt soils and temperate climate that encourages an incredible range of produce. Almost everything seems to grow up here!
….And then…we spot another Zone parked by us. So we all introduce ourselves and it turns out the Zoner (Ken, owner of #101) was someone I had already previously messaged to meet up in Cairns, as I had seen he had just picked up his van.
Skipper Mark let the motor rip, and sped us up to the quieter parts of the river, about 10km upstream. I spotted a Forest Kingfisher (my first one!), a blur of blue and white as we whizzed past, and hoped there might be more when we slow down.
Our skipper lowered an electric boat motor into the water, and we moved slowly past for a better look, before leaving him alone in search for more wildlife.
We spotted a Spangled Drongo and a Wompoo Fruit-Dove flying past. Our skipper called it a Wompoo pigeon, arguing a fruit dove is much smaller. That’s not what my best selling bird book says, but hey-ho…
In dire need of defrosting, we decided to head to a nearby restaurant for dinner and a warming glass of wine…much better.
A fine conclusion to our visit to Cooktown, but not sure we’ll be recommending the bird watching tour!
Once we hit the road, we headed north through amazing scenery, the roads winding upwards between rolling hills, with several lookouts along the way.
It was around 2pm that we rolled into Cooktown, the final frontier settlement before heading up Cape York. This is the top of the road on the east coast for us on this trip.
Unlike in other areas of Australia, there is a real feeling of acceptance, with black (Aboriginal) kids running around with white kids, and the same with adults. We later chatted to a local Aboriginal guy who told us that Cooktown is probably the first place in Australia where there has been real reconciliation and acceptance amongst both parties. It certainly feels a lot closer than we have seen elsewhere.
We walked along the Main Street just soaking up the atmosphere, before returning to the rig to drive another 20 minutes up to our campsite.
Memories of our fabulous Daintree River cruise encouraged us to book a similar sounding trip for Wednesday afternoon on the Endeavour River. Fingers crossed it delivers.
My staff have continued to escort me up the east coast of Australia, and I must admit some of the locations have not been too bad. I have not experienced species discrimination lately (yes, would you believe some camping areas allow those noisy, smelly canines but will not allow felines!), which is always a positive.
In addition to those big lizards, there has also been the occasional snake…they tend to make them rather large up here though – I still prefer to stalk a ribbon in the comfort of my safe-Zone.
Right, time for another nap, so over and out for now.
We took this as a good omen that we might see one of the rare and endangered Cassowary birds – at between 1.5 and 2 metres tall and up to 80kg, they would be hard to miss!
From here we continued north, calling next in at Dubuji Boardwalk and Myall Beach. The short walk was very informative, and as always full of incredible sculptural rainforest trees and vines.
We drove up as far as the 4WD commencement of the Bloomfield Track which leads up to Cooktown, before turning and calling in to more short walks at Cape Tribulation and then Noah Beach.
There’s so much to learn about the rainforest, and incredible that this has been around since the time of dinosaurs, many of the plants changing very little in that time.
Oh and the Cassowaries? Nowhere to be seen…
It is such a sweet area, with tin roofed pub/cafe/Australia Post, an information centre, general store and campground. Right beside the campground (which has a viewing platform across the river) is a boat ramp and wharf, which from the 1800s up to 1933 (when the road from Mossman was opened) served as the main route in and out of the settlement. It was from this wharf that residents exported butter (it is a dairy farming area) and brought in everything else they needed to live relatively comfortably. Today it is where small craft take visitors out on crocodile spotting tours, or bird and wildlife spotting tours if you choose to go with a local expert as we did.
Next we travelled back along the road to Daintree Eco Lodge and Spa. I had booked in for a two hour session as my birthday gift from Mr A. Needless to say it was luxurious, a massage with essential oils, body scrub, hot mud and washed down with warm water from the local waterfall, followed by a more intensive massage and deep conditioning hair treatment. I emerged smelling like a geranium joss stick, tingling all over with slightly greasy looking hair!
What a cruise. Not just the birdlife (to name a few we saw Striated Herons, Wompoo Fruit Doves, Great Egrets, a beautiful Sacred Kingfisher, Rainbow Bee-eaters, Sunbirds, Spotted Catbird…) but the stories of other wildlife (the snakes, the bats, the crocs) and the flora (Ylang-Ylang tree flowers – the main ingredient in Chanel No 5, the numerous fruits and seeds from the mangroves, the reason for the changing colours of the native hibiscus – yellow on day one, which drops off once pollinated, turning to orange and later a deep pink on further days until pollination is successful).
Apparently several years ago, Crocodie Hunter, Steve Irwin, flew up the Daintree River in a helicopter checking out the crocodile numbers and investigating all the waterholes on the way up. They found crocodiles as far up as 40km from the estuary in a waterhole at the top of a high waterfall – somewhere that traditionally people (including us) would have thought was safe from crocodiles. It made us re-visit all the beautiful waterholes we have swum in across the Kimberly, Lichfield and Kakadu in a new light!
Sunset was a whole new deal. Our skipper asked whether we would mind heading back a little late so we could watch the incredible phenomenon of the flocks and flocks of Eastern Great Egrets flying along the river to their roosting spots. Absolutely incredible. The breeze had totally dropped and as we sat there waiting the sky changed dramatically, from salmons and peaches to a deep Pinot red. Even the locals raved about the sky later on and the following morning!
The birds were also magical, and kept on coming…the photos do not do it justice, you really need to hear the flap of their wings and the frantic cries of the stragglers asking their mates to wait up.
We moved swiftly on to the fortified wines which were a little more palatable. We walked away with a bottle of Kaffir Lime, which would be lovely with a splash of soda water as a light aperitif, and a Chocolate port for those moments which require a little more decadence. We have a delivery of delicious Margaret River Amelia Park wines being delivered to Palm Cove ready for our return to Cairns, which will much better suit our palates.
Once away from the swimming areas it is relatively peaceful, moss covered rocks with a crystal clear creek tumbling down all around, surrounded by old growth rainforest of the Daintree National park. 
Birds flitted around, perching sideways on the vines that hang down from the canopy above and swooping across our path to catch the insects we disturbed as we strolled along. Being rainforest there was a lot of rotting wood, and with that an amazing array of colourful fungi – I drove Mark crazy with my gasps when I saw the next amazing colour scheme I had to capture.
Giant fig vines which had long overtaken their host tree were a key feature, looking like incredible sculptures with their expansive roots and vines, often more than a century old.
It is definitely a photographer’s paradise, with often two or three people already set up in front of lovely waterfalls with their cameras on tripods, stealing the best positions for their digital artworks.
We returned happy, having had our taste of nature and got showered and ready for dinner.
Fortunately we were pleasantly surprised – not only an interesting menu (for example an entree of prawn & crab salad, burnt corn, pickled coconut, chilli, shallot, green pawpaw and a ginger citrus vinaigrette, and mains of Spanish Mackeral with a rainforest salad – mesclun, Quandong, rainforest lime, roasted macadamia, lemon myrtle & vanilla vinaigrette) but also a great wine list. Top marks Mojo!
