That's a 10: Roscoe and Tony score the vehicles coming through Sam Creek.

As long as they don’t break their vehicles too much, they are all having fun coming up the Old Telegraph Track on the way to the Jardine River near the top of Cape York.

Dan and Fay Flickweert from Gladstone reckoned they were having a ball in their new home-built camper and young Kai Buckley from Canberra proudly showed off gaps in his gums where he lost two teeth.

We made a few inquiries about the OTT when we were hanging around Bamaga and learned it is easier to do it coming north than going south.

Ah so. We were already north. We decided to toddle into part of the track and see how we went. More to the point, we were interested in how others went.

We pushed through a track turning east off the northern bypass and set up camp for the night at Sam Crossing. Tony and Ross found a small sheet of corrugated iron and a piece of charcoal to give rating scores on vehicle crossings. Only three scores were available: 10 on one side and 9 on the other which could be made a 6 when held upside down.

As it turned out, the crossing was pretty easy and most made it with a 10, although one did almost run over the chap standing in the middle of the creek guiding him.

 After the crossing traffic slowed in the afternoon, we had with clear pools and carnivorous plants to explore. We waited vainly for a tubular flower to eat a fly had to settle for a stunning sunset over our campfire.

Dan and Fay were among the first to come through the next morning. They have a small cattle farm outside Gladstone and Dan, an exuberant Aussie bush Santa Claus with flowing grey locks and beard, does contract work. They had come up the Telegraph Track last year with a slide-on camper on their Mitsubishi Canter. They had so much fun they upgraded to a bit more space in a tough new slide-on built by Dan. It had all the iron bells and steel whistles befitting a bloke who goes under the name of Aussie Iron on the Expedition Portal web site.

They were tackling everything there was to tackle. Dan had a video mounted beside his window: watch the space on the web site. He’s planning to do a little fishing up north. Good luck with that mate.

From Canberra came the Buckley family, laughing after easing down the rocks and negotiating  Sam’s hidden washout. They declared Sam pretty easy.

Steve and Kim said their three children – Cameron, 9, Kai, 8, and Gabby, 5 – were having a ball on a three-month campervan trip to the Cape and over through central Australia. Kai had lost two of his teeth on the Telegraph Track. The tooth fairy had visited the night before when they were camped at Elliot Falls. They were on a mission. Sam’s birthday was the next day and they wanted him to celebrate it at the Tip.

With a gappy grin from Kai they were on their way.

 

About 20km north of Bamaga where the red dirt forks to Punsand Bay on the left and the tip of Cape York on the right, Dale and Lee-Ann Mears are selling souvenirs and raising a family.

Their home is serious open plan behind the iconic, isolated Croc Tent, struggling to stay white as crimson dust creeps up its skirts against a jungle green backdrop. A roof, no walls and a couple of containers are home to Jaxson, 2, and 8-month-old Benji.

Four years ago in Brisbane Dale (above) worked with childhood behavioural problems and Lee-Ann was a scientist with Sullivan Nicolaides.

“We wanted to get jobs where we could be at home with our children when we had them,” said Dale. “Lee-Ann’s parents had been running this for five years and were thinking of selling up. We decided to buy in and move here.”

Jaxson and Benji were born in Brisbane – in the quiet wet season when the only tourists are those who come by barge or plane to brave the summer swelter. Dale is proud his boys are growing up as country children and loves being able to share every day of their childhood.

Like many others at the Cape, he is a keen pig hunter and he is tickled little Jaxson is taking a keen interest in the slain pigs that come home to the Croc Tent.

Each winter tourist season Dale and Lee-Ann move an assortment of Cape York souvenirs and a couple of thousand T-shirts emblazoned with “I did the Telegraph Track” and “I made it to the Tip”.

In the summer swelter they have about six weeks off to manage the resort on nearby Arundel Island while the manager there takes a break.

The Croc Tent has been a feature of the north since 1984, when it was started on the Wenlock River. Four years later it moved to the fork in the rainforest road north of Bamaga. Early owners slept in swags under tarped lean-tos.

The Croc Tent became the Mears family home because about 10 years ago Lee-Ann’s mother woke up in Cairns and said to her husband “Let’s go for a walk.” Terry Webb worked in wildlife conservation so he wasn’t too aghast when wife Davida, a nurse, suggested walking from Coen to the Tip, a stroll of almost 500 km.

They flew to Coen and walked unassisted with swags and gear. They dropped in at the Croc Tent and found the current owners were planning to sell up. As they walked to the Tip, Terry and Davida talked it over.  By the time they returned to the tent they had decided to chuck in their jobs and buy the Croc Tent.

Dale has become passionate about having quality Australian-made T-shirts in the Croc Tent in the five years since he became a full-time souvenir seller. He tells of one customer who came in a while back complaining his shirt was worn out. He had been wearing it continually for 13 years.

Our travelling companions Ross and Heather looked amused. Heather nudged Ross. He confessed. He was at the Cape 16 years ago and Heather had just persuaded him to throw out the thin, holey “I made it to the Tip” shirt he bought in 1997.

It was sentimental value, protested Ross as he bought his new “Made it to the Tip” shirt. Dale assured him it would probably last him another 16 years.

 

Advice from all quarters says if it is really windy don’t bother going to Thursday Island, said Tony. We were sitting at Punsand Bay and it was really windy, as it is most of winter when the east-south-east trade winds blow over the tip of Australia.

We wanted to go to see Doctor Jenny Wharton of Cairns, formerly Jenny Lewis of Toowomba. She was the niece of our travelling companions, Heather and Ross and had taken a 10-week posting to Thursday Island.

I had long been fascinated by Thursday since I was a child and read the Jon Cleary novel North From Thursday. It was more about New Guinea than Thursday Island but I still had a hankering to go to the Torres Strait Island.

We took a peek at the weather decided it would be lovely to visit Thursday on Thursday. They went off with Tony and booked for Wednesday (don’t ask me), then we found out that Dr Jenny was being helicoptered to another island for a clinic for Wednesay and Thursday. So we settled for Thursday on Friday.

The trade winds were kind. Fares cost about $130 for the day trip, or $56 concession. An hour’s trip from Seisia (pronounced Say-see-a) sailed us past Possession Island where Captain Cook stuck in the flag pole and declared all of Eastern Australia belonged to King George III, who went mad and lost the American colonies.

To the east of the tip of Australia is pretty Somerset Beach and the ruins of the first European settlement at the top of Cape York. Somerset was supposed to be the base for pilots to guide ships through the Torres Strait and inner Barrier Reef but white ants ate the buildings and big tides played havoc with the pilot boats.

Thursday Island was selected as the second site and today is the base for 50 pilots to guide about 2000 ships a year through the tricky waters. It was named Thursday because Captain Bligh, adrift in the long boat after the mutineers threw him off the Bounty, sailed past a nearby island on a Wednesday and named it Wednesday. Bligh missed Thursday and Friday a little to the south (it’s complicated).

Turquoise waters surround Thursday, although they were not quite as stunningly brilliant after I took off the Polaroids. The walk from the wharf to the town has pavement inscriptions in a time line of significant occasions in the island’s history. Some famous TI people were quoted. My favourite was this from Ephraim Bani, a Torres Strait chief who worked as a pearl diver and later studied linguistics and anthropology, becoming a leading force in TI cultural heritage: “The past must exist for the present to create the future.”

We caught up with the delightful Dr Jen at the hospital, had a quick tour and learnt she loved the place. She often cared for Torres Strait islanders when they were flown to Cairns hospital so she would return with a better understanding of their culture, homes and afflictions.

One of the challenges at the neat, modern hospital was trying to decide when to call in the helicopters. The doctors take calls from other islands and a few remote northern mainland settlements such as Bamaga and need to make a decision over the phone about whether a sick or injured person should be flown to Thursday. Helicopter evacuations are expensive. The doctors also need to decide when a patient at the Thursday hospital is serious enough to warrant an evacuation to Cairns.

After hundreds of kilometres of dust, challenging roads, crocodiles, ants, snakes, and new experiences such as spending a night in a gravel pit, chemist Heather almost bloomed in the spic and sterile rooms of the hospital. She confided in Dr Jen that she almost wept for joy when we finally reached Punsand Bay and she discovered a flushing toilet.

Mona’s is the hot souvenir spot in town. I indulged in a bit of whimsy and bought a fake frangipani to wear in my hair for lunch at the Torres Hotel. Flowers in the hair seemed to be the thing on Thursday. On the way back to the wharf I wandered back into Mona’s to chat with the fun staff Francine Zoia and Michelle Resek.

Michelle lives on Prince of Wales, the biggest island in Queensland with no power or water. The Reseks have 24 water tanks and solar power and the family embodies the cultural diversity of Torres Strait.

“We are really bloody mongrels,” grins Michelle. Her father was an Austrian who fled the Nazis and ended up in New Guinea. He married Michelle’s mother, who had a Papua New Guinea mother and US father. Michelle’s husband is descended from Japanese and Malaysian pearl divers; their children can also mix in Aboriginal and Torres Strait blood.

Mona’s girls tell me I am right on line with my fake frangipani. The reason why all the women are wearing flowers in their hair is because it’s Friday. On Thursday Friday is flower day. Yay!

PICTURE ABOVE: Michelle Resek (centre) with fellow Mona staffer Francine Zoia (right) and council worker Nola Ward Page. Friday is flower day on Thursday.

 

North of the Jardine River all roads seem to lead to the relatively new town of Bamaga, created by Torres Strait Islanders who first settled on the mainland after the war.

Faced with big tides spoiling their Christmases by flooding their island, they moved to the disused military base at Mutee Head. Neither water nor soil was wonderful there, so after a few years they moved to Bamaga to grow their crops.

At pretty Mutee Head we found nothing but disillusioned fishermen, a few piles where US Navy sailors used to tie up ships during WWII and, on the hill, a slab of concrete that used to be the radar base. Further inland is the air field and some preserved plane wrecks that bring home the solemn side of war.

A DC3 en route from Archerfield to New Guinea crashed with the loss of six lives on May 4, 1945. A crew of three died in the Bristol Beaufort Mark VIII torpedo bomber which crashed about the same time.

Tony and Roscoe were fascinated by the terrific Australian craftsmanship still evident on pieces of the wrecks (above). They almost saluted the unknown workers who had welded and riveted the planes. Why, they asked, do we need to bring inferior goods from overseas now when we clearly have trade skills of superb international standard?

Fascinating too are the rusting piles of fuel drums hidden in the bush around the Jacky Jacky airfield. A few hundred drums here and there, including decoy stacks of empty barrels, lessened the chance of bombing, sabotage or accidental explosion.

In Bamaga we became part of the bakery’s roaring trade, returning to sample the signature crayfish pies.  Not so happy were a friendly but slightly downcast Geelong couple waiting for the barge from Cairns to depart at nearby Seisia.

Some not so intrepid souls who make it to the tip take the easy way home by tossing their vehicles on to barges and flying to Cairns to continue driving home. Mr and Mrs Geelong had come north in a Toyota Coaster, braved the Telegraph Track and were heading home when the transmission conked out south of the Jardine ferry.

Recovery vehicle fees are not cheap up here. Then they had the cost of the barge to Cairns, road freight back to Geelong and their own fares. Insurance would help but even a crayfish pie would not provide enough soothing for the poor souls.

Signs, as noted, are a bit lacking on tracks around the north of Cape York. So are dunnies. Cousin Heather wondered why travellers, after bumping hundreds of kilometres over corrugations and crossings to get to the tip, find no relief for bladders before or after walking across rocks to most northern point of Australia. It’s a fair hike along a bumpy track back to any sort of loo.

On the up side, apart from the crayfish pies, are the sensational sunsets we found at Seisia. (The strange name was formed by the patriarch of the islander family that settled in the spot beside the sea. He put all the first letters of Christian names of his family together and came up with the acronym.)

We ventured out on a ferry. Tony and Roscoe were appalled at the shoddy workmanship evident in the welding. Clearly this vessel had been made overseas. Nothing like the grand Aussie workmanship still evident on the plane wrecks.

A crew member heard them tsking. He shook his head sadly. No, it had been done in Australia. That did nothing for the boys’ souls.

Mutee Head, we were told, was the place to find fish. Ever hopeful we toddled off to the former WWII naval and radar base near the mouth of the Jardine River.

Mick Reid and his dad Jim from Victoria are camped there. They have fished around the Cape and just trolled 20 kilometres through the water off Mutee Head. Nothing much more than puffer fish and a little pike they hope to use for bait.

Mick, a fitter, has had time off to battle cancer. He’s had dozens of radium treatments. Jim, 78, has a faint accent that betrays his early years near Glasgow. His wife died not long ago. He decided to spend his life savings setting up a vehicle, off-road caravan and boat to bring his recuperating son north on the fishing trip of a lifetime.

They are having a ball. Mick is feeling 100% better. But there’s no fish. Mick says that if he wanted to catch fish he would have been better staying home and going to the south Sydney coast around Eden. That’s where the fishing is really good.

Signs of life are in the sea early the next morning. A family of porpoise bobs past about 60 metres from shore, heading south. An hour later a croc, maybe 3m or 4m, cruises past heading north in the same lane. That’s it.

We leave Mick and Jim setting off hopefully in their boat aiming to lure something sizeable by dangling their pike – a commendable bait fish we affirmed – in the azure sea. (See photo above)

Vrilya Point was the best place to fish, we heard. Few roads in the far north are marked so working out which track to take can require a process of elimination. Troopy Trailer didn’t like the look of the log bridge so we gave that a miss. We later spoke to several hopefuls who braved the bridge. Nothing caught.

On the way back down south, we hear more forlorn stories. A retiree Queenslander among a vexation of Victorians at Bramwell Roadhouse says he knew of one big catch. “Me. I was the catch of the day for the bloke who sold me all this fishing gear to come to the Cape.”

At Archer River, a young bloke is packing up with a similar sad fishing tale. His mate bought 200 lures to come fishing on the Cape and hardly had a bite. Every second vehicle has a boat atop. Most, we suspect, stayed as dry as the one on Roscoe’s Cruiser.

The south-south-easterlies were blamed. It was too cold. An intergalactic superhighway is about to be bulldozed through the peninsular and the fish, like the dolphins in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, have fecked off. So long and thanks for all the dolphins.

We drifted into the Lakeland National Park to find the famous lagoons and water lilies. Fellow travellers had told us the area was a bit boring but we thought we would wander through anyway.

We camped beside a saltwater creek. Tony noticed activity in a tidal pool. Half an hour later Roscoe had a barramundi that provided dinner for four around the campfire. Next morning Tony landed a half-metre flathead.  After the couple of decent barramundi the boys landed just after we set out for the cape, we were grateful.

PHOTO ABOVE: Boys on postie bikes: Bryan Kenny, Wayne Burkhardt (front), Peter Lyndhout, Scott Wheeler, Matthew Schult and Ben Streich.

 “Good God. The posties have arrived,” said Tony as we perched on the edge of Punsand Bay, the most northerly beach camp in Australia.

Two camp sites away, some young men were lifting themselves gingerly off bright red TT 110 Honda bikes, the kind the posties use, fitted with XR fuel tanks.

A few months earlier, six blokes aged somewhere between early 20s and 30s had been having a few beers in Cairns. Someone said it would be a challenge to do a trip to the Tip on bikes. Someone else suggested red postie bikes.

Three weeks later the six of them had all bought their bikes. A few months later they arrived at the Punsand Bay campground after five days of riding through billowing red dust and over millions of corrugations.

Over the corrugations wasn’t too bad at a speed around 70kmh. The problem was when the corrugations widened and deepened so the bikes thumped in and out.

“You had to hang on,” said Wayne Burkhardt, a diesel fitter. “And stand up a fair bit.”

How did they feel when they finally made it? Relieved, said Wayne. Thirsty, said Bryan Kenny, who claimed to be a male model and sometimes boilermaker.

Thirsty too were the little Hondas on their journey north. They had gulped down remarkable quantities of oil as they spluttered their way to the Tip.

Making up the postie bikes team were electricians Matthew Schulz and Peter Lyndhout, plasterer Scott Wheeler and diesel fitter Ben Streich. All shared a common interest in trail bike riding for years. The boys had five bikes with them, four on the road on each stretch and one in the back-up ute with the other two members of the party.

Goggled and muffled with bandannas to keep choking dust from passing vehicles out of facial orifices, they   came up the bypass roads and planned to return through the creek crossings on the Old Telegraph Track.

Scott reckoned they had come through more than a thousand kilometers relatively unscathed, with one burnt-out motor and two burnt legs.

Had they ever felt like turning back? On day one, apparently. Said Bryan: “We had told too many people what we were going to do to turn back.”

They tossed their swags under a big tarp and reached for coldies, ready to relax for a couple of days before heading back. The return journey would be a little easier, they thought. They wouldn’t be on such a tight schedule.

How long were they going to take all up? “Two weeks - ish,” said Bryan.

What did it take to do what they had just done? Stupidity, came the answer from six quarters.

Some people did this sort of thing for a reason, mused Bryan. They did it because they had a few beers.

All agreed being bike enthusiasts had been an essential ingredient. What else?

“Be prepared. Read up on it,” said Wayne.

Said Peter slowly and emphatically: “Lock. Tight. Every. Bolt.”

The boys’ high spirits grave testimony to Bryan’s opinion: “Don’t just talk about it. Do it. It’s been the best time I have had so far.”

It was also tiring, if the synchronized snoring coming from the swags that night was any indication.

If you wanted to get away from the city life, idyllic Punsand Bay is warm, pretty and remote. Surprisingly it also has fairly good reception near the beach, so half the people wandering the sand or stretched out at camp sites are busily texting, calling or googling to find out what is going on in the world they declare to have left behind.

Remote ain’t always remote anymore. Just a bit harder to reach.

Punsand is a rustic campground charging $14 a person for a non-powered site. It is a bit exxy, especially when no fish oblige by hurling themselves on the lines poking out hopefully on the shore. A charter boat from around the corner at Seisa delivers some would-be fishermen back to camp at Punsand with two extremely expensive pan-size fish.

Beside us with a camper trailer is the Brisbane family I called Techs on Treks. Tony and Cassie Jewson with their two children encapsulated the new world of technology. They even moved with a new-world efficiency as they zipped around Cape York.

Tony is the first on-line server manager I have ever met. I knew there a faceless people around the world who mysteriously keep web servers serving. Now one has a face and a friendly, non-nerd personality.

Tony manages a bank of servers based in St Louis, US. He works in Brisbane; the staff work in Mexico, Russia and anywhere. They keep the servers rolling non-stop 24-7.

Cassie runs a website design company. They both work from home or anywhere they can link in to the web. The kids are even more internet-savvy than their parents.

Josh and his little sister Shannah have come up the Telegraph Track with their parents and had a ball as their 4WD tilted through tracks and crawled or crashed into crossings. They have been enjoying the bush life but now they know Punsand Bay has service they hanker to get back into cyberspace.

Tony is charging the batteries only enough to stop them shaking from withdrawal symptons.

Josh, who Cassie says is the web brainiac of the family, says yep, the Telegraph Track was fun but he’s ready for home. His fingertips are itchy for the whole world.

The odd thing about the intermittent service at Punsand Bay is that is a little better than what we left at home near Maryborough. Hey Telstra! What is going on?

Musing on the virtual world, I stop to have real-life communication with the neighbours behind us. They are a couple of nurses from NSW who decided to roam Australia for a year or so in a camper trailer, homeschooling their young daughter.

I am apologetic that Isabel, on our beachfront site, is blocking their view of the ocean and, if they had sensational curving eyesight, Papua New Guinea.

Perhaps they would like to join us for a drink at sunset so they could enjoy the uninterrupted ocean view, I thought. Feeling my way to see if they partook of alcohol, I asked “Do you have sundowners?”

Ms Nurse looked at me in alarm. “I don’t think so,” she said uncertainly.

I hesitated: “I thought you would like to join us if you did, seeing as we are blocking your view.”

Confusion and a little fear flashed over her face until we worked out she had mis-heard or I had mis-spoke. With some relief she said “Yes. Yes we do. I thought you were asking if I had Alzheimers.”

I left musing more on the value of face-to-face communication. They didn’t join us.

PHOTO ABOVE: Cassie and Tony Jewson with "net braniac" Josh on computer and Shannah (left).

Any sound sedan can make it to the northern tip of Australia as long as it has reasonable clearance. Anyone who says they did it without rattling and bouncing, whether in a 4WD, truck or tractor, is also likely to tell you they found the moon surface fairly smooth when their all-mighty vehicle was there.

Drivers are always inclined to overstate the abilities of their own choice and design but I would have to say we were heartily pleased with Isabel as we sailed and staggered over the challenging corrugations on the Bamaga Road bypasses. Tony is pretty happy with her clicking over between 5.5 to 6 km to the litre and most of our teething problems have been minor. A couple of doors just don't want to stay shut but we are working on it.

Isabel's parabolic suspension, remote adjustable air over oil shock absorbers and Stratos suspension seats give us as smooth a ride as we could reasonably expect. Ross, the machinery magician following behind in the man magnet Troopy Trailer, says the suspension was a joy to watch, with the wheels jigging and bobbing but working independently of the house which swanned along steady as.

The legendary Jardine River ferry is a bit controversial because the council has almost doubled the cost of crossing but we paid $129 for a five-minute ride without complaining. Towing Troopy Trailer cost Ross and Heather another $10.

Fuel was $2.30. It was $2.35 at Bamaga but a little cheaper in the Aboriginal communities of Injinoo and Umagico. We don’t mind. It’s remote. You know you will pay more and it’s cheaper than towing your own tanker.

We head for Punsand Bay, the most northern camping spot on the mainland. The idyllic setting on the beach facing out to New Guinea had been calling to Ross for 16 years. Then, on his first and last time at the Cape, he was catching enough fish to give it away. To his intense disappointment he cannot get a bite. Neither can anyone else. Tourists are everywhere but fish are not.

We head off to do the pilgrimage to the Tip. At the carpark it seemed almost written that we should meet the Boof Brigade from South Australia. Low tide allowed us to walk around the beach almost to the signboard.

A steady line of people traipsed down to get their photograph taken at the sign saying this was as far as the Australian mainland juts north. About 60 metres away a young woman sat on the rocks watching her man fish. He was, she said, trying to catch the most northerly fish that would be caught off the mainland that day.

After a bit of pole dancing, kissing and posing around the sign we headed back over the rocky headland in the buffeting south-south-easterly that hurled the occasional shower at us. The lonely fisherman was still trying.

We said goodbye for the third time to Chris, Geoff, Karen and Boof, vowing to meet in South Australia or Maryborough. We saw them half an hour later at lovely Somerset Beach, where white ants and tides in the late 19th Century aborted a plan to make it a base to take ships through Torres Strait and the inner barrier reef.

Ruins of the homestead of hardy pioneers are there as is the road to Fly Point. We explore and back out. Fly Point and a coastal track would reshape and scratch our beloved Isabel a little too much right now. Next time. She needs seasoning. 

The Old Telegraph Track runs straight up the centre of the Peninsula and is no longer maintained since the two bypasses were built. The southern bypass loops east, the road crosses the Old Telegraph Track near the middle and the northern bypass loops to the west to the Jardine River.

At Archer River Roadhouse we enjoy the famous $11.50 hamburgers and more advice on the state of the OTT. The roadhouse was populated by neatly dressed chaps in tangerine or mustard coloured shirts – the support gang for the Just For Kids escorted 4WD tours, we discover.

Isabel had been a bit of a star, attracting lingering looks from males, but was put in her place when we joined up with Cousin Heather and Ross and Troopy Trailer.

Ross works with heavy machinery and had spent a couple of years cutting back a Troop Carrier into a reinforced camper trailer, belted with chequerboard stainless steel, sporting a bash bar underneath and all sorts of attachments and detachments.

She had been the talk of the CB. Her front end was a man magnet. If Isabel’s upswept arse was the machinery version of Jo-Lo’s rear, then Troopy Trailer was Dolly Parton.

She had been photographed endlessly but at Archer River we were amused to see one of the tangerine shirts on its back photographing Troopy Trailer’s nether regions with a tablet. After Troopy, the tablet was focused on Isabel, especially her interesting arse as usual.

The wearers of the orange and mustard were, we learned, part of the Just for Kids charity group that escorts 4WD enthusiasts on annual trips along the Old Telegraph Track and out to the west. One of the One of the tour guides turns out to be John Rutland from Hervey Bay, a Vietnam veteran who came over for  yarn when he noticed Tony’s Vietnam vet sticker on Isabel.

All of the guides are entranced with Troopy Trailer, their admiration making up for the sarcastic comment over the CB a few kilometres back: “Hey mate, which one is pushing and which one is pulling that contraption?”

The boys have just been up and down the Telegraph Track and say Isabel will plough through the crossings but will be squashed on the deep, narrow cuttings. Troopy Trailer is also in doubt as a bit too low slung, even though she is reinforced with a skateboard thing underneath.

We decide we don’t want to scratch and dent Isabel just yet and Ross isn’t too keen to see if he can flip little Troopy. We opt to stick on the bypass roads, where the main interest is the width, depth and prevalence of the corrugations. We will re-assess the temptation of OTT from the north.

Photo above: John Rutland and Tony at the Archer River Roadhouse where the $11.50 hamburgers are huge and so are the occasional floods.

 

When travellers wander in Australia in roughly the same direction, it seems inevitable that paths will criss-cross in the same time frame.

We should not have been surprised, then, to find on our arrival in the Weipa caravan park our old mates from the Moorehead River. Boof, Karen, Chris and Geoff from South Australia were relaxing a few sites away.

We shared experiences and sundowners before they moved on the next morning. By that time we were also close friends with our next door neighbours, Scott Thomson from Cairns and Paul Forrester from the Sunshine Coast (left), who had proved excellent company.

They had finished up work with a mining construction crew at Moranbah and were taking time off to fish around the Cape. How long they were away would depend on their girlfriends, the Ministers for War and Finance.

They are heading north up the Old Telegraph Track and like others are irritated by the National Parks system of pre-booking on line or by phone. They can book at Weipa for one of the camping grounds on the OTT but they are not sure when they are going to be at any given point.

We muse on that and also on other mysteries. For instance, a camper trailer near the toilet block has a sign “The Mayans taught us that if it’s not finished it’s not the end of the world”.

The other mystery is the tide pattern of Cape York. We are perched on the foreshore at Weipa and estimate high tide should be not long after dark. We put out the crab pots and after dark Roscoe wanders out into the dark with his fishing rod.

Heather accompanies him on croc watch. She is not needed: there is no water. We contemplate that mystery and work out that a little tide had been in and out while we were yarning. We go to bed. About 2am we wake to the sound of waves splashing on the beach.

How did that happen? What would the Mayans have done with the Cape’s tide times on their calendar?

Scott admits to being a bit damaged the next morning. The boys set off to test fishing spots and we elect to do the Weipa mine tour. Bus driver Gary is a mine of information. We learn the history of the Comalco operation that was expanded by new owners Rio Tinto from 2000.

Everywhere is coated in bauxite orange-red. Belly-emptying mine trucks are of a design not found anywhere else in the world. Thirty per cent of the world’s bauxite comes from hundreds of acres of scraped earth, hauled out to waiting ships over the largest single lane rail bridge in the southern hemisphere.

Trains are limited to 3400-tonne load limits every 40 minutes because of the pay load of the bridge, which is shut down if the wind wobbles it by blowing at 60 knots for 60 minutes. A third of Weipa’s 3500 population goes to school; the Royal Family is the biggest shareholder in Rio; and the company donates $100 to breast cancer whenever the female workers elect to wear purple boots. If a rock creates a bubble in one of the $11,000 tyres on the big dumpers everyone clears out because if it blows the blast can knock over an average-size vehicle.

We have a couple of drinks with Scott and Paul on the foreshore and commiserate with them about their poor day fishing. We throw a blue swimmer, a small male muddie and a female from our crab pots the next morning and move on.