It’s difficult to believe but our Cape York adventure is finished and we have enjoyed every bit of it. We have spent a month travelling from Karumba to the tip of Cape York and back to Cooktown, driving slowly and stopping frequently at interesting places.

After our previous update from Weipa the road was mostly quite good for 120km until Merluna Station, about 8 km off the main road. Merluna is a working cattle station that now has a good reputation as a place to camp. There are several shady trees, a small swimming pool, and they serve a meal for anyone who wants to join the road workers who use the station as a base. Sunrise on a cool morning was pretty.

Going further south the roads became very rough again, with severe corrugations, but the occasional sealed sections were a welcome respite. We stopped overnight at Musgrave road house, one of only 2 of the old telegraph stations still standing, camping at the rear of the road house with 5 other caravans. It was interesting to see the road house staff feeding freshwater crocodiles and turtles in the lagoon near the area.

We then headed east toward Lakefield National Park, calling into Lotusbird Lodge on the way, where we took a walk around the beautiful lagoon filled with white lilies. We kept an eye out for crocodiles; they are there but we couldn’t see them.

Lakefield National Park is huge. The road is said to be unsuitable for caravans and much of it is very bad. For about 40 km we drove at 30-40 kph but sometimes we could speed along at 50 kph. The narrow, winding track into one lagoon camp area had dry creek crossings and we got bogged in the sand at one stage, having to dig our way out.

The corrugations and bull dust holes are difficult to see until the last moment. Lots of people camp here, spending their time fishing for barramundi but we just relaxed beside a river.

As we traveled east toward Cooktown we realised that we didn’t really want to be in civilisation yet so we stopped at Endeavour Falls caravan park, about 30km out of Cooktown. The park is beautiful, very quiet and with lots of shade, although we didn’t need shade because it rained for the first time since leaving Adelaide. The water fall beside the park is nice; what a pity we can’t swim there.

Cooktown is a nice town, bigger and better than we remember from our previous trip here 9 years ago. It has several cafes, pubs, shops and a good supermarket. The lookout from which Captain Cook viewed the surrounding land and waters provides a good view of the town.

Today we were to head south for Cairns morning, ready to stay a couple of nights there then fly further south to Melbourne for a week to see our grandchildren. Unfortunately we had a caravan brake problem after leaving the caravan park and we are waiting (5 hours after we tried to depart) for the brakes to be repaired. Lucky it happened here, not on some outback track where repairs can’t be done easily. Hopefully we’ll get on the way soon and free camp somewhere along the road to Cairns.

Bye for now, from Ted and Jo in Cooktown