Cooktown 2nd – 4th July 09
The road from Cape Tribulation to Cooktown is a well known 4x4 only dirt road – The Bloomfield Track. The drive can be quite challenging and it’s best to travel at low tide as it can be difficult to cross the deep Bloomfield River.
We started the drive early and purely by chance were on target to hit the river at low tide. The road was very steep in places, one bitumen section we had to stop on the hill, apply handbrake and foot brake, then use 4wd low range to get up! Took a long time at 5km/h!!
The track was winding, we crossed a couple of rivers and passed through some very nice rain forest scenery before we arrived at the dreaded Bloomfield River. The causeway across the river was bone dry and the water we expected to see was well below the road – we were dead on low tide. We crossed the river and stopped for a bite to eat before continuing on the dirt all the way up to Cooktown.
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| From Cooktown |
Cooktown is so called because Captain Cook stopped here for 7 weeks to repair and restock after he had damaged his ship on a reef.
We pulled into town late in the afternoon and looked immediately for the caravan park that we had casually agreed to meet Sandy & Elliott at. We found the park and got booked in on the last available site, we could see Sandy & Elliott’s car and knew that they had arrived. The night before we had spoken about our cars and I had said that as we had no cash we hadn’t serviced OJ for a very long time. Elliott is very handy when it comes to mechanics and he said that we really should do an oil change if nothing else. He offered to help us, all I needed to do was find a place that sold oil in this tiny town. Least I didn’t have to go far to scout around!
With the oil purchased from a service station we set about changing the oil whilst trying to make as little mess on the campsite as possible. We chopped the top off an old water carrier and drained the very thick black oil (clearly OJ needed the change).
With the car serviced we thanked Elliott by cooking him dinner and providing a few beers.
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| From Cooktown |
In the morning we went to Tourist info in the very large Botanic Gardens and did some trip planning over coffee and a cake – very pleasant. Then we did a little sight seeing going to the town lookout and the marina area. Cooktown is a very picturesque place surrounded by forested hills and turquoise blue waters.
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| From Cooktown |
Over the last couple of days the fridge had been playing up and was not coming on all of the time thus getting to warm for the food. Today however the fridge would not come on at all and we made a call the service centre to see if there was a place in Cooktown that could look at it for us. There was, so we made a dash over there (we were due to leave for Cape York proper in the morning and Cooktown was the last town we would see for a very long time!)
The fridge was not working when we pulled it out of the car and took it to the service guy. He plugged it to 240V as it had been on 12V and nothing changed, took the back off and said it was likely to be the power supply but could be the compressor. He said either way it didn’t matter as he did not have the parts to repair the fridge and that the nearest place that would stock these was Cairns…
No sooner had he said this and the fridge suddenly fired up and started cooling.
We decided that we would carry on up the Cape and hope that the thing would keep running (Fingers crossed – the fridge was full with recently purchased food!).
That night we chatted once more with Sandy and Elliott and asked them if they would like to travel up the OTL with us (The OTL should not really be tackled alone). They said that they would have a little chat about it as they didn’t know how much time they wanted to take and see if it was possible.
In the morning the answer we were looking for came and we had new travel buddies for at least the next 10 days.
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| From Cooktown |
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| From Cooktown |
Cooktown
