Cooktown

I've been particularly slack lately with keeping the blog up to date. No particular reason for the slackness as since Gwen and Vince left things have been a little quieter on the adventure front, so i've had the time to do it. I simply forgot about it! Got halfway through that last one, and then my mind was diverted for a couple of weeks. We've started helping out with the music at church so we've been having a few music practices and doing a bit of planning for that which has taken up a bit of our time, as well as the usual gardening and trimming out palms etc etc. We've had an absolutely staggering number of cherry tomatoes off our six plants, so i've planted some more to harvest in another few months. Realistically I should keep re-planting them every month or so then we'd have abundant cherry tomatoes all year round. Anyway, still learning about this gardening buzz. My latest plantings are of some baby carrots which should be delicious, and i've just yesterday ripped out the courgettes (final tally a miserly two - which, though delicious, don't nearly make up for the amount of effort taken to try and grow them!) and will try and get to planting a different variety of beans - purple ones this time... will see how they go! Passionfruit vines are screaming along at a great rate which is cool. Though still no fruit there. Evidently it's not fruiting season though so that's to be expected. I had someone tell me recently that sometimes you don't get fruit off a passionfruit vine for the first couple of years, which would be gutting, as i'm not entirely convinced we'll still be here in two years time to reap what we've sown. Last weekend we headed back up to the Copperlode dam for a wander, and saw some swallows nesting which was cool - Abbey was babbling away and pointing at them too so she clearly knew something of what they were about. Spring is a truly infectiously good time of year!Anyway that's a huge digression. This weekend just been we went for a visit to Cooktown. Cooktown is about as far as the Bitumen goes in Queensland and is about 4 hours drive north of Cairns. We left friday after work for me, headed for John and Bev Shay's place. John and Bev are (my brother in law) John's parents, Mikaela's in-laws. Reason for the visit was to be part of celebrations for John Snr's 60th Birthday. Kinda strange that we managed to make it to John's 60th but failed to make it home for my Dad's last year, and will likely fail to make it back for Vince's in early Feb next year (Due to a lack of finances...). But John and Bev are wonderfully welcoming people and have kind of adopted us as part of the far north queensland family. So we got to stay in a palace of a tent that they erected for us on their lawn, and in beds that were probably as comfortable as ours back in Cairns (despite being camp stretchers with inflatable mattresses on top!). John and Bev have a couple of stunning properties in Cooktown - the one they live on has about an acre of developed gardens, with a load of mango trees and haliconias and ornamental gingers planted throughout the gardens. The other property comes complete with Shay road! (The public access that was conditional on the freehold title.) Amazing place too - it sits about 15km out of town and is surrounded by world heritage land (meaning there will never be any neighbors). The property itself is about an acre of rainforest plopped on the edge of a lagoon, which despite being only a few hundred metres from the endeavour river (where a poor chap was eaten by a 4.5m crocodile a couple of weeks ago) is completely croc free and safe for swimming. When they bought the property, they inherited a squatter who lives on it - a delightful old Austrian chap called Frank who lives in the turn of the century dilapidated hut that sits in the middle of a clearing bordering the lagoon and inside the rainforest. Pretty cool place really. After visiting there we did head down to the endeavour river to see if we could see any of the famous beasts, but they were all hiding themselves, at least from us. And lets be honest, we weren't exactly game to go dancing down the riverbank for a chance of seeing one. Maybe some other time. We did get to see some cool wildlife on the way up - the usual little wallabies and bigger wallabies which I would call Kangaroos, but which I was assured were just a bigger, different type of wallaby. Supposedly there's no Kangaroos in Cooktown. Despite this fact, there is a plaque on top of grassy hill suggesting that the first european sighting of a Kangaroo was there. Grassy hill is where the lighthouse is situated, probably Cooktowns most famous monument. The lighthouse has been there since the late 1800's, and there used to be a chap who lived on top of the hill with his family of four kids to manage the thing. Pretty good views at work! Cooktown is obviously named after Captain James Cook, who stopped there for some running repairs on the Endeavour before continuing his voyages, back in 1770. Grassy hill is today covered in trees rather than grass, but used to be covered in grass which the indigenous Aborigines would burn periodically to encourage new growth. The new growth would bring the Wallabies to feed on it, and they in turn provided good tucker for the Aborigines. Clever really. Except for the bit about chasing them up that bloody steep hill. We didn't see any wallabies up grassy hill, but on the town side of it is the botanical gardens which the wallabies obviously enjoy due to all the nice big shady trees. Nice spot for a wander too. Very cruisey weekend all in all, lunch out on the banks of the Endeavour river with John & Bev and John & Mikaela, at a wee restaurant that did superb burgers punctuated the morning and afternoon of exploring all the aformentioned sites, before dinner at a cute wee italian restaurant with staff who knew most of the guests on a first name basis... I guess that's a distinct advantage of small town living - everyone knows everyone. I couldn't resist taking the couple of snaps of roadsigns. You know you're in sunny Queensland when even the sheep and cows are wearing Akubra Hats to protect them from the sun, not to mention their cow boots! Mental note though, look out for the giant, car eating cows... I guess in the dry, scorched landscape these beasts can work up a mighty appetite! I wonder if they stalk moving cars, like overgrown leopards? or if they just eat the ones who a dumb enough to park in the parking spot. I kid you not, probably 50km from the nearest roadhouse or station (let alone town) there is a well signposted parking space. Quite why you would want to park your car in the scorching heat of the outback with no civilisation for miles around is quite beyond me. Unless of course you want your car to be eaten by one of the cows!!! The drive back seemed a lot longer than the drive up, perhaps because we'd seen it all a couple of days earlier, perhaps because the cows weren't all over the road distracting our attention,

perhaps just because it was hot and the middle of the day. But we did have one of those

experiences that stays with you for a lifetime... On the road opposite a magnificent (and bloody huge) Wedge-tailed Eagle was sitting eating a kangaroo/wallaby carcass. As we drove by, he simply looked at us and adjusted his position so he was facing the car, but remained on his food (so when we were alongside him we were only about a metre away!) and this bird was huge - probably stood about 0.4m tall with his huge talons and had a wingspan of somewhere just under two metres I reckon - easily over a metre and a half though. And easily the biggest prey bird i've seen in the wild before. Very very cool. We stopped at the side of the road to try and get a photo, but as I opened my door he took off and went and sat in a tree that obscured him from our vision. We sat and waited for him to come back for five minutes of so, but he clearly had all day to wait for us to leave him in peace to finish his dinner. Very Very cool though. The other quite cool thing on the way back was this black granite mountain which sits in the middle of all the scrub as quite a stark contrast against the blue sky. Evidently it is home to black mountain pythons which can grow up to 8m! They would have been exceedingly cool to see also, but alas we didn't spot any of those! Cool place though. The photo doesn't really do justice to the slabs of granite, most of which were about the size of cars! Like God had dumped a whole load of left over rocks in the middle of the landscape! The other thing that I loved was all the contrasting trees. I tried to get a couple of cool shots, but probably the best example of these trees side by side was the first one I saw, that made me think of taking the photo (by which time we were a kilometre down the road). Maybe another time we can get a better example. Amazing though how you get these white trees sitting side by side with black ones (some of which are black because they've been burnt). Mother nature obviously picks and chooses which she will burn and which she will spare. Very cool.