Author: Mr A
Location: Cooktown to Mareeba then Atherton
Thursday: For the first time since we left Sydney in March, I pointed our nose south. Cooktown would be as far north as we would go on this trip, saving the raw beauty and corrugations of Cape York for another time.
So on the drive from Cooktown to Mareeba we were mostly retracing our steps, and was nearly the last drive we would ever do. The sides of the valley narrowed and steepened right to the little bit of hard shoulder, and Catherine suddenly shouts out “COW!!!!!”
There it was right on the hard shoulder, looking all wide eyed and about to bolt in front of us, as it had nowhere else to go. Coming the other way was a huge road train. It is moments like this that make outback touring so…..interesting. I swerved out a bit, the sway control kicked in and kept me from fishtailing, and the road train answered with a big horn, he had nowhere to go either. Somehow the three of us managed to all pass each other without touching. Jeez that was close.
I tend to drive around 80-85km/hour on most roads. If I had been going any faster I think this blog would have come to an untimely end. I will continue to drive below the speed limit with an eye in the rear view camera and move over as soon as I safely can let other vehicles past.
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.
Friday: We decided to divert on the way, to check out Australia’s “Distillery of the year”. I was intrigued. The sun had yet to strike the yard arm, so some may say a trifle early for strong liqueur, but what the heck.
The Mount Uncle Distillery sits in the middle of a banana plantation, and a farm that grows most of the ingredients for their products. They distill a range of spirits and liqueurs, so we decided to taste the vodka, two of the gins and the whiskey. Did you know that gin is vodka with juniper added? We didn’t! And these guys are adding a range of other locally grown botanicals such as mint and myrtle. They were all delicious, we would have brought some whiskey but at $170 for the cheapest…..pass.
We were told by the lady presenting them that they made a whiskey from a single barrel which has just one won “a double gold medal in Melbourne, competing against over 150 others”. I was intrigued so tried to check on their website – apart from a bunch of typos and repeated content there was no reference to the award.
A Google search revealed a Facebook video with no content whatsoever. If you are going to ask customers to pay $500 for a bottle of something, you would expect a bit of collateral to be available. But no…apparently a Chinese actor walked in last month and brought 14 bottles! Perhaps he was taken with the name – “The BBC ” – full name “The Big Black Cock”.
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!
Anyway, we sampled locally gown macadamias, peanuts and chocolates and came away with a goody bag containing not one fruit or vegetable…..because we had found out a local market was on tomorrow.
After much debate, we had decided to go for a Big 4 caravan park in Atherton. We aren’t usually a big fan of these places but this one is an absolute cracker. We have a huge grassy site looking onto a forest, with birds everywhere, clean facilities and a nearby rail train into town (which of course we had to explore)….
….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.
Drinks were called for, and much comparing of notes. Every time we meet another Zoner they always turn out to be lovely people. What is about the product or company that attracts such likeable people? To be honest we haven’t met many people on the road around happy hours that we would go out of our way to see again. But Zoners…always good 🙂
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!
Willie started to take us on a tour of his “backyard”, where his grandfather’s bones are buried and where he was birthed. He explained what they ate and drank, plucking plants and fruit for us to smell and feel, and talked about the seasonal migrations from the bush to the beach, at pains to point out they were not nomads but followed a set path of migration along the songlines.
The knowledge of flora and fauna these people have accumulated over 40,000 years and passed on through stories, music and art is just incredible. He had Catherine mix up some seeds in her hand that are used to put a protective coating over a wound, while he had another lady rubbing together some leaves from the soap bush creating a cleaning compound that was antiseptic.
We were led to a birthing cave and Willie explained the symbolism of some of the drawings, how they were painted and why. A big question the community is discussing is wether the drawings should be renewed, as they fade after a couple of thousand years. A couple of thousand! Incredible..these timeframes are mind boggling.
Catherine and I tried to take in as much as we could, but it was like walking into a library and having a teacher open a couple of books at random and read a few lines. We knew it was but a fleeting glance into a world we will never fully understand, but certainly appreciate and respect now even more what a trove of wisdom is there.
If you come this way, support these efforts to help us all better understand and respect aboriginal culture. Willie Gordon can be found at Cooktown Cultural Aboriginal Tours – the information centre knows where to find him or indeed others like him.
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.
We finished up with a whole range of other fresh locally grown fruit and veg, so with our fridge crammed to capacity, we then turned off the coast road we had followed for so long and headed inland, up onto the north end of the Atherton Tablelands. We watched the scenery change dramatically as we climbed up the range, the Cruiser doing its usual impeccable job of dragging the 3 tons of loaded up Zone up the steep climb. Our destination was a place called Bustard Downs, a working cattle farm with some camp spots we would stay the night on. As we drove down onto the property we were immediately struck by the amount of birds around.
When we met the owner she said around 150 different types have been logged by local birders, so we set off to explore. 
Even the cattle were beautiful!
Only one other caravan was there on the whole of the property, well until 6.30 pm when it was pitch black, and we are in full dinner prep mode for a nasi goreng feast, with me wearing a clear plastic glove on one hand as I was cutting up the turmeric (it stains your skin yellow)..and there was knock on the door. I opened to find a lady at the door, another van had pulled up right next to us. They had been delayed on the road after hitting a kangaroo and she was asking me where the camp office was.
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…
This was Tassie’s first trip across water, she was looking a little puzzled out of the window, not too impressed with seeing water in all directions.
The caravan park we had selected (oddly called the Rainforest Village, given it was a petrol station and a lovely open space for camping) was the furthest pet friendly one travelling north along the Cape Tribulation road.
The bitumen ends in another 20km or so, then its a rough four-wheel drive only track surrounded by National Park all the way to Cooktown.
We spent several hours here, it could have easily been longer, there is so much to see and read about. 
For instance, the Daintree Rainforest contains 12 of the 19 oldest plants on the planet and many other species found nowhere else on earth. The fauna coverage is also huge as well, the Daintree has 20% of Australia’s bird species, 35% of its marsupials, frogs and reptiles and 65% of our bat and butterflies species!
We could have stayed longer – much longer – but we decided to head off for a walk, hoping really for a cassowary sighting. Alas, it was not to be. However, we did get to experience again the majesty of being immersed in this unique ecosystem. Some of the trees we spotted were huge, especially next to the lovely little package of Mrs A. Some of these are over 500 years old apparently. Brightly coloured cassowary plums littered the floor, and crystal clear streams regularly meandered across our path.
Spotting birds up in the canopy isn’t easy, particularly when you have my poor eyesight, but thankfully eagle eye Mrs A was there to draw my attention, and my trusty bins soon picked them out.
Back at the Zone we then spotted two Wompoo Fruit-Doves up in the tree next to us. Their calls are very distinctive, which is a good job as despite being so colourful, they are hard to spot once they are stationary up in the canopy.
As I hope you will have decided by now reading this blog, if you haven’t been to this area before you simply must. It’s hard to describe in words just how special it is, Mrs A does a much better job with her images I think. It’s sensory overload from the sights, to the sounds and then those smells unlike anything else.
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.
I won’t steal her thunder other than saying it’s a cracker. More minor successes followed, storage space is limited for clothes even in the Zone, so both our wardrobes are showing signs of wear. I’ve decided to continue with the worn and faded look. After years of spending far too much money on clothes I’ve now mostly given to Vinnies, I can’t bring myself to over indulge anymore.
Mrs A picked up a few more things, then indulged in a chocolate sorbet – yes that is just chocolate, not rotten teeth!
We found some locally grown tea and locally made chocolate, and I even caved and bought myself some new shorts – all in all a successful little foray into civilisation before moving north tomorrow.
We returned to encourage a sleepy cat to go for a walk and to get started on packing up in preparation for moving on. After questionable first impressions, we are going to miss sleepy old Newell Beach.
