Rob 'n BOB on the BNT
Cooktown, Qld - 27 October
2003
I checked
in at the
Coconut Resort in Cairns, a beautiful caravan park and campground,
where
Gwen and I have been before. I stayed for 4 nights.
This was time
I needed to make final preparations for my ride, such as the purchase
of of a PLB
(Personal Location Beacon, for emergencies) switch the SIM card in my
cell phone, so
that now I have an Australian number, mailing all my food and equipment
parcels
ahead to various locations along the route, buying food staples to get
me started on the
first sections of trail, and so on. I'm now on a prepaid mobile plan,
and in Australia you
don't pay for incoming calls! So when I am in a cell reception area I
can call home for a
minute and then get called back and yack for hours without it costing a
fortune in
airtime. What a deal! And calls within Australia are just 30 cents for
the first 10
minutes (7pm to am). My last day in Cairns
I took a little half day trip to Green Island to do some snorkeling.
Although very popular, Green Island is perhaps not the most fascinating
place to do
this, but is was a quick and easy little trip and since it happened to
be low tide I was
floating just centimeters above bits of coral and saw the most
gorgeously beautiful
coloured fishes. Yesterday
I took the
little country bus to Cooktown. I had made reservations a few days
earlier, and when at the apppointed time no bus showed up, I phoned
them. Good
thing. They did not have me on their manifest and would have gone
without me!
Minutes later the bus showed up, and it turned out I was the ONLY
passenger on
board, all the way to 
Cooktown,
hardly a profitable trip for them.
Sitting in front with the
driver it was a most pleasant trip and since he was born and raised in
this area he
was
a font of all kinds of useful information. My initial
plan had been to detour off the BNT
track and follow the coast for a couple of
days, through the Daintree
region and Cape Tribulation, where the
rainforest meets the reef. This is a very
special area, but after
driving through it and seeing all the traffic and clouds of dust and
from what the driver
told me, I have now decided to stick to the proper BNT route. It
apparently is much
"realer" rainforest a little bit further inland than along the coast,
and I will be sort of
hugging the coast for the first day or two anyway. I guess it will have
to do. The rest of
the trail, all the way to Melbourne, only hits the coast one more time,
between Mackay
and "Rocky", but it is all mangroves around there and no beach areas
for nice swims in
the blue ocean. Who knows, I may hitch hike to the
coast for a couple
of days when I
get further south. Today I'll do a
little discovering Cooktown and then, tomorrow, I am heading out on my
trek. The intial stage is along the partially paved and part gravel
road that we drove in
on yesterday. No swimming off
the coast here, too many bloody crocs!
Well Mates, that's all for now. I'll be back with another update probably within a couple of weeks or so.
Robert
