Aug 12-13 (Day 194-195) – Umagico to random quarry near Jardine River

 Wednesday August 12

We decided for sure that we were going to head off this time! It’s a lovely spot here at Alau Beach Campground, but $44/night is a bit unnecessary when all we’re using is the pool, toilet and shower. Remember Woodgate during lockdown was $41/night with power and water in a full grassed caravan park! So we had breakfast, did our morning reading, and packed up the site.

Our campsite at Alau Beach -
Torres Strait in the background

Our last morning dip at Alau Beach!

The perils of being remote

Two of our fellow campers at Alau - Jeff and his wife - had left two days ago while we were at the Tip but cameback last night. He’d had a drama with his car – they’d left the campsite and driven down to Fruit Bat Falls (where we visited on our Old Telegraph Track day August 4) where they left the van, drove on to Eliot Falls (which we’d also visited) but then crossed a creek too quickly and without checking the depth, and the engine got a lungful of water! He’d had the car and van towed back up to the top end, the van being delivered back to the campground while the car was assessed in Bamaga.  He headed into Bamaga this morning to see the engine’s condition, but came back with bad news – it was destroyed!

So now they are stuck with a van but with no car at probably one of the most remote parts of Australia, in a place where there are no car yards and no means of getting it economically repaired!  This seems to be a place cars go to die – there are loads of wrecks in yards, and those on the roads have been on rough roads a lot, so the chances of buying a vehicle to safely tow a 3 tonne van back to civilisation is remote.  They were quite despondent, understandably!  We offered to run them into town for food and whatnot but they had all that sorted, and as we were leaving that day and couldn’t take any more people let alone tow another van, there was nothing we could offer them other than our good wishes. I’m really not sure why they brought the crippled vehicles all the way back up here, even across the Jardine River ferry!

It would have been far better in my mind to take them down to Weipa where there are better services, and it’s closer to real civilisation too. But up here it’s so isolated – apparently supplies are brought in by barge rather than road as the roads are so bad – good luck getting a crippled car and an orphaned caravan on a boat back to Cairns economically!  He was talking about flying down to Weipa to get a vehicle when we left. May God bless their plans! (edit: we bumped into them on August 21 and got an update, so keep an eye out for that entry!)

Back to the diary!

After packing up the site we went for a swim for an hour or so.  Matt drove the car and van out (he loves driving and even successfully backed the van about 50m along a U-shaped road), we filled up with water, and then got on our way.

First stop was the town of Seisia (pronounced ‘SAY-shya’) to empty the caravan toilet, pick up some supplies and top up the fuel tanks ($1.60/L).  One gas bottle had run out and these people did swap-n-go – normally in town this is $25 and in country towns it’s been $29. Well it was $60 here! We let this great deal go – we have a second gas bottle on the front of the van, plus another we use for the outside stove when needed so we’ll wait until we get back to civilisation to sort this one out!

Seisia doesn’t have very much.  There are a group of businesses, lots of wrecked cars rusting away, a couple of supermarkets, a caravan park, a petrol station (the northern-most station on mainland Australia!) and the wharf from where tours to the nearby islands and commercial cargo leaves.

We drove back through Umagico, and then briefly looked around the town of Injanoo which is slightly further south.  This was more residential than Seisia but not a particularly inviting place either.  The one service station looked fairly deserted. One interesting thing here though were a herd of wild horses grazing on the verge and which decided to stop in the middle of the road as we approached!  All these horses we’ve seen are fairly timid of people.

"Why did the chicken..." no wait... - one of many wild
horses roaming the streets of Injinoo

Hmm... fresh diesel?

As we left Injinoo we stopped on the side of the road to make lunch and another wild horse came up to investigate the car and the van, much to Bek’s delight, and was happy to have a sniff around her!  Mim brought lunch into the car, and this friendly brumby decided to poke its head into the car to follow the delicious smell of Strasburg and lettuce sandwiches!  Mim was not impressed!

"Oh nice lady - why you close the window?
How much I love sandwiches!"

"Ahh here's someone who appreciates me! Surely a quick snack while I'm here is OK??"

I had a bit of business communication to do on Skype which I did while we were here with phone signal, as south of this you hit a real desert of phone signal until you get back to Coen (barring the ultra-expensive ‘Roaming Wifi’ at some of the roadhouses).  This done, we drove out but just as we left signal I got a message back which required my attention, so we had to turn around, go back into signal, and then sort out a little misunderstanding about our next shipment of freight to Amazon.  That done, we were on our way, properly this time!

On our way to the Jardine River ferry we came across a track which led to some campgrounds down by the Jardine, opposite where the Old Telegraph Track used to come across (this crossing has since been closed), but it turned out to be too narrow for our setup, so we went straight on to the ferry.  We weren’t exactly ready to leave the Northern Peninsula Area and come back across the Jardine River, because it’s so laid back up here; but there wasn’t much else to do and we did need to move on so we crossed the ferry, scraping the back of the van again, and headed off.

We were headed for an ‘unofficial’ campsite shown on Wikicamps about 30km away, but along the way I’d spotted a couple of red clearings out to the east (left-hand side) of the road which looked worth investigating.  We passed another one so stopped, turned around and pulled in.  It appeared to be a quarry where they would dig up red dirt to resurface the road, however there were small trees growing up in spots where trucks would have gone, so it didn’t look like it’d been used for some time.  There were no truck tyre marks coming in, and only a set of car tyres or two.  The other good things about this site were that there were about 50m of trees between the road and the quarry, the floor of the quarry was quite smooth and flat, and it was also about 4m below road level – so our car and caravan couldn’t be seen from the main road.  No water for swimming here, but other than that it was perfect!  The road wasn’t heavily used, and late in the afternoon as we were, we expected little traffic once the ferry closed at 5pm, which proved to be correct.

 

Our campsite on August 12 in an old quarry

 

Jude found this small lizard

The boys had some driving practice, during which time we discovered another track heading deeper into the bush.  We started to explore it but decided we’d take a walk along there a bit later instead.

Bek was going to have a drive but she was working on her pan pipesou may remember back at Mossman she had collected lots of bits of bamboo and cut them to length, and we’d been taking this bundle of bamboo around for the past month.  She got it finished and it sounded very nice!

We went for an evening walk along the aforementioned track, which was quiet and peaceful.  Lots of trees which have been burnt at some stage in the past few years, as well as many termite mounds from the termites munching on the dead wood.  The track continued for some time so we turned back to camp and decided to explore it in the car tomorrow.  We had dinner, did our readings and headed to bed.

Our planned route to North West Queensland

Onto another matter… for some time we’ve been looking at the route to take out of the Tip and towards Northern Territory.  The most direct route is ‘Dixie Road’ which starts around the middle of the Cape (between Laura and Coen) and cuts diagonally south-west down to Normanton, which is by the Gulf of Carpentaria.  It’s about 200km long between Artemis Station and Dunbar Station, but some parts are marked as a ‘track’ so its condition isn’t certain.  The alternative is the main road we came in on, which then splits into two different highways (Hwy 1 or Hwy 27), but that takes you right down to Mareeba and then across to Normanton, which is about 1200km! 

So we were naturally keen to investigate this Dixie Rd.  But information was pretty hard to come by! I’d looked on this website and this one earlier in the trip about this road which gave varying information which would depend year to year on the river levels and any recent upgrades done. But no-one I spoke to had ACTUALLY done it recently to speak about the current state. Well just as we were packing up at Alau Beach we stumbled across someone who had!  A new couple who came in last night had travelled up that way and said it was quite passable, nothing at all for us to worry about, especially as the river levels were only about 30cm deep.  Whether we travel that way or not remains to be seen, as the long way round will take us past some sights we may want to look at anyway.

 

Thursday August 13

 This was a pretty quiet day generally speaking. We had no phone signal so I did a bit of work on a new product brochure and the kids did some school work. One of the benefits of having no signal is that I can't get a lot of work done (well that's a plus and a minus), but when the situation arises it's lovely to get other things done instead. Last night I picked up Theophany again which I started a little while ago. I also helped the kids with their school work for the morning, which was also a lovely experience.

Later in the day Matt went for another drive and we managed to get bogged for about 10 minutes

-- Greg