CAPE YORK TRIP - 2005

CAPE YORK TRIP - 2005
Saturday 16 July to Friday 22 July 2005

We have now been travelling in our new Bushtracker home for a week. It has been fantastic and everything so far has worked the way we thought it would. We basically headed north without any sight seeing as we have seen this part of the coastline before and our goal is to get to Cooktown to start our northern trek.

We stopped off at Maroochydore to fix a few things at Bushtracker on our way. We spent the first 5 nights staying at roadside rest stops. The rest stops have great facilities, toilets, water, BBQ, space and lots of other travellers at each stop with stories to tell. Everyone is so friendly.

The weather for the first few days was sunny and increasingly warmer as we travelled north however over the past 3 days the rain has been heavy at times with strong winds. Nothing has bothered us and the van has no leaks. The car is behaving itself and pulling our 3 tonne van effortlessly, the only penalty being that it CONSUMES a massive amount of petrol!!!! We have stopped off at some beaches for lunches and a stroll and the road from Cairns to Port Douglas which hugs the shoreline is spectacular. The highway north is flanked by huge fields of sugarcane along with some banana and mango plantations. The many shades of green overlaid on each other are beautiful and contrast with the blue tinge of the mountains in the background.

We have seen no live kangaroos so I guess the kangaroo deflecting whistles we put on the front of our car must be really effective??

A huge male Southern Cassowary managed to stop the traffic on the highway as we all watched it look at us and then decide not to risk crossing the highway after all. It was very funny to see and interesting to hear the truckies talking about it on the UHF afterwards. We arrived in Port Douglas on Thursday night and are staying at our first caravan park 6km out of Port Douglas. We have met up with 2 other couples also towing Bushtracker vans and hope to travel together to Cape York. Today we had breakfast together in Port Douglas and then walked the main street of shops.

We then spent a few hours walking through Mossman Gorge north of Port Douglas, it’s a rain forest (part of the Daintree) and it rained through the canopy for all 5km of our walk. But it was just spectacular. So far, so good.