Step 99 Mareeba – Cooktown 271 km's

Thursday 4^th August

Another grey and overcast start to the day. Even a few drops of rain. Pretty sure that's the first rain since Coral Bay. That's two months, two states and eight and a half thousand kilometres ago. We still complained.

Before heading off from Mareeba we stopped off at Coffee World. 

A bit of a museum dedicated to coffee and coffee making equipment. It was really quite well done albeit a little expensive. On the other hand you get free re-entry so if you were staying in town longer you could really make the most of it as they have a dozen or so coffees that you can taste. If we had come here straight from Melbourne we could probably have gotten through more coffees in the tasting but we have been pretty much weened of the stuff and I was getting light headed after my third espresso. There was a time I would have considered that just the start of the day.

As well as hundreds of coffee roasters, coffee grinders, coffee percolators, coffee pots

part of the exhibition is dedicated to Belly Dancing. Now that's something that's missing from the coffee shops I frequent in Melbourne. I think I will have to have a word to Sam when I get back. It's a business opportunity he is missing, I'm sure Mt Waverley is ready for a bit of belly with their coffees. I know I am.

Photo caption: Di – but her legs aren't that good are they?

Steve – she has legs?

Not surprisingly, very few Turkish men have been divorced because of this law.

After being dragged by my ear out of the belly dancing exhibition coffee museum we set off for Cooktown.

Drizzled most of the way.

Given the rain and the cooler weather we stopped at the Palmer River Roadhouse for a pie for lunch. Cool and wet weather, much more like pie weather than the 30 degrees the other day.

The road up to Cooktown is amazingly good. Only one lane each way, but the road surface is well maintained and it's a really pleasant drive. The last 20 km's or so it gets a bit narrower and more potholes but considering this is the last bit of bitumen before the road turns to a 4wd track to Cape York it's all a pleasant surprise. Less than 7 years ago the last 50km's into Cooktown was all dirt apparently.

Another pleasant surprise is Cooktown itself. I'm not sure exactly what we were expecting but it's a reasonable sized good old fashioned Aussie country town. In it's hey day, during the Palmer River gold rush it was a thriving metropolis with a harbour that saw more ships than Brisbane of the day.

Before we checked in we sat down by the wharf and took in the view of the inlet and the Coral Sea. The inlet is where Captain Cook beached the Endeavour for repairs after hitting the Barrier Reef. While taking it all in I did ponder how he managed to hit a reef that he had been sailing along side for over a thousand kilometres. On the other hand I am in awe of how those early explorers made it this far. I get upset with our GPS when she can't find a Caravan Park in an outback town and these guys sailed from one side of the world to the other by looking up at the stars in the night sky and shouting “a little bit to the left helmsman and we should hit Australia in about three months.”

Despite it being directly across the road from the pub we checked in to the Orchid Valley CP for two nights as it means we can just walk around town and take in the sights.

We are rewarded tonight with live music, without leaving the van. But it's all over by 10:00 so it's actually quite nice.

Friday 5^th August

Another coffee start to the day as Herb has tipped us off that Jackie Jackies at the other end of town makes good cappuccinos, and he's not wrong. A pleasant trip down memory lane as we sit out at a coffee shop drinking coffee and watching the world go by.

So Mr Wong, do you want to buy my recipe for special fried rice?

On our walk through town Steve re-enacted scenes from history and classic movies:

Captain Cook – Does that look like a reef to you Bosun? There directly in front?

Titanic – “I'm flying Jack”

Ben Hur – the slave galley scene (beating out the stroke rhythm for the rowers)

Tiananmen Square – Stop! Or I'll squelch all over your tracks.

After lunch back in MM we got a bit of a tropical downpour. But true to form for this part of the world it was all over in a few minutes and things brightened up again in time for us to wander up to the James Cook Museum.

Again it's amazing how lucky these guys were at times. Having hit the reef and put a hole the size of a large car in the side, the crew managed to pull a tarp under the boat from one side to the other and stem the leak. They then managed to sail up the coast and find an inlet within a few kilometres where they were able to beach the boat and complete the repairs. If they had hit the reef a hundred kilometers away they would have been stranded, and probably dead, and we might all be speaking French now.

The Queen' was here just after her trip to Whyalla. Here is an extract from her speech:

“I should just like to say that Phillip and I have recently been to Whyalla and one finds your town infinitely more attractive.”

Wild cheering from the crowd

“Before you get to excited, I would add, that Whyalla is an extremely unattractive town”

Diminished cheering

As some sort of self flagellation I decided to pull the HP laptop apart this evening, convinced that it's a hardware problem of some kind. It turns out there are 57 screws holding this thing together, that's about 47 too many. When putting it back together I compromised, I have 20 screws left over. But, with half a kilo of dust removed from the internals, it now starts. Let's see how long that lasts.