Be Prepared……..for anything.

Sunday we started our trek home, we travelled the main Development road and broke rule number one. “Stop and camp regardless at 3:00pm” we decided today to catch an extra couple of kilometres and stopped at Archer River Homestead. Camp facilities were pretty good but we didn’t have much to choose from at 5 in the afternoon. There was limited space and we huddled close to the caravans, our neighbours weren’t impressed with someone’s snoring. “I’ll leave all names out of this one.” We discussed some possible options to continue our journey and finalised them in the morning.

Monday we got up to finalise our options, Rob and Jo decided they were going to stay on the main road while Ken, Lucie, Lyn and myself decided to take a more adventurous option and take the road leading us towards Cape Melville. We anticipated from the map that the road would take us approximately and extra two hours to travel which would be fine.

So 9am we hit the road about an hour after Rob and Jo had left and made way for Cape Melville, we got to Bramwell Junction and fuel up without incident a little down the road we made the turnoff and came across a beautiful, river crossing with the water flowing quite well over it. Couple of photos and we were through the water and off again. We travelled for a couple of hours winding through the bush and through dry creek crossings. We came upon a spot that was obvious to us that it would be quite nasty in the wet and as we approached noticed cars on the side of the road. They waved us through and as we accelerated past we could see they must have hit  the dry ruts and one of them must of bounced over quite hard and lost control, bringing them to a sudden stand still helped by a Grey Ghost Gum. Realisation set in on how easy it can be to come undone in our sometimes not so forgiving country side. So checking that no one was injured and being assured that there was plenty of people there to help we continued our journey.

A little down the road (Aussie Terms) we approached another spot this time with water, very sloppy and a bit of a challenge. Ken led the way and struggled to get through, the biggest challenge was the exit point that had a sandy base and even with his lockers engaged found it hard to get the traction need to pull the T-Van up. Out he got with the trusty shovel and dug himself out and finally managed to get to the top.  Seeing as I’m not as energetic as Ken I decided to hit the creek straight on and managed to get through without incident, making me feel pretty proud of myself I must say, but this was to be the beginning of our adventure.

We continued along the main road for a little more when we hit what can only be described as a quagmire. Ken took the left line and I thought for sure he was going to get his feet wet but with plenty of wheel spin the mud terrain tyre did their job. NEXT, me, seeing how deep it was I decided to take what appeared to be an easier line, trailer in tow and off we go, half way into it all you could hear was echo through the bush “KEN, COME AND GET ME.”

As we sat there and waited for Ken to get into position, another car turned up and was easier for them to help than for Ken to turn the Cruiser around with the T- Van. After what seemed to be an eternity they managed to winch us out, by the time we got to dry land the muddy water had resided and I was no longer paddling in ankle deep water around the brake pedal. We sat there for a little while to allow us to check that our supplies and bedding wasn’t wet and we were off again.

We were really committed to the track by now and it was getting late, as the sun started towards the horizon the road began to thin out even more. We continued through and the bush started to thicken and Lyn pointed out that she had found some details about the track from a book we purchased back at Lakelands. It read, “Although this route is being improved, it still takes 4 to 6 hours to travel the 98km from Starcke Homestead to Wakooka.”* You could imagine how the air suddenly thickened in the car.

We continued on and had to use the jerry cans of fuel by now, one thing you need to be prepared for; fortunately we both had plenty of fuel on board. As the sun started to creep down on the horizon we found that we were nowhere near the end of the track, the track was interesting though, we came across a couple of wild pigs feeding on the side of the road and a couple of Bustard birds, also known as Plains Turkeys.  

As the sun was setting we contemplated stopping for the night to set up camp, but after discussing our where abouts and the time we opted to continue through until we hit Cooktown and joined Rob and Jo. With the sun gone, we slowed our pace even more to prevent anything getting damaged with the sudden impact of a rock or hole that were a lot harder to see.

Approaching 8pm, we travelled along nice and steady, all of a sudden we saw light through the trees, Great we thought, Civilisation! As we approached it turned out to be others camped on the track, they were just as surprised us as we were, one of them (Neil) asked where we were headed and decided to join us as he had busted both wheels on his trailer along the track and felt it safer to travel with us than by himself. This was good, as Neil didn’t have a trailer, he drove ahead of us and kept us informed of any possible hazards that were on the journey back to Cooktown.

By this time we were not in best spirits and the track began to throw us some curveballs. As we moseyed along the track we would often find it forking, one way was huge washouts that could bring us undone, while the other would be the detour to get around them. With the detours often came the ability to manoeuvre around trees or other smaller washouts. With the T-Van coping a bump or two we had lost all enjoyment of our detour and just wanted to get to camp.

 

*Insert from Cape York, An adventure’s Guide by Ron and Viv Moon