Far Northern Queensland and the Cape York Peninsula
We were fortunate enough to be able to take a 2-day outback trip by 4-wheel drive vehicles from Cairns. This was a commercially organized trip run by a company that specializes in ecotourism. You can follow the route taken on this map. Leaving Cairns we headed north on the Captain Cook Highway to Smithfield heights and then through Kuranda to the cattle town of Mareeba. At Mareeba we turned north on the Peninsula development road, through Mount Molloy and Mount Carbine to Lakeland. Here we headed west to the Split Rock aboriginal painting site before heading back the same road towards Cooktown. Our resting place for the night was in the "town" of Homerule. Next morning, we drove south to Bloomfield, Cape Tribulation, Daintree, Mossman, Port Douglas and back to Cairns by evening. It should be noted that from the Palmer River Roadhouse just south of Lakeland until the Daintree river was all on unpaved roads. These varied from well graded 2 lane dirt roads to what appeared to be a stream bed. Without doubt, we needed the 4-wheel drive vehicles (Toyota Landcruisers and Nissan Patrols)!
The area immediately adjacent to the coastline is a narrow strip of mountains covered in rainforest. However, as you pass over these mountains (part of the Great Dividing Range), the climate becomes drier and the vegetation more sparse. By the time you get to Mareeba, there are many of these huge termite mounds on the side of the road.
One of the first stops north of Mareeba, at lake Mitchell. This is a well known bird sanctuary famous for it enormous flocks of wading birds. True to form, we saw about one bird! This was vastly outnumbered by the legions of bird watchers who lined the crocodile infested lake.
Rachana at Lake Mitchell
No really, there are supposed to be birds here! Look, there it is.
The view from Bob's lookout just south of the Palmer River Roadhouse
The Outback Burger. They don't sell anything like this at McDonalds. For starters, it is about the size of a small child and contains just about everything you can and can't imagine; beef, bacon, lettuce, tomato, egg, beetroot, pineapple, assorted other canned goods and a full-sized spare in the trunk. I thought it was merely a culinary aberration peculiar to a single chef until we had another one the next day in another town. Maybe the cooks were brothers, it is after all a sparsely populated area.
Once we were past the Palmer River roadhouse, the road turned to dust as seen in these two photos. It is a general rule of outback roads that the bigger you are, the less you have to consider others. Roadtrains (basically very large trucks) carry most trade around here and will not stop for anything. As this one approached, we pulled over to get out of the way. The dust cloud can linger and makes driving all but impossible.
Split Rock. This region is famous for its ancient aboriginal cave paintings and rock carvings. Being so dry, they have survived intact for an estimated 13,000 years on a series of overhanging rock faces. These are sacred sites so they ask that photos are not take of the paintings themselves.
Casey at the Black mountains, south west of Cooktown.