' A bicycle! A bicycle! Where in the kingdom is my bicycle?

We were feeling that we must push on now if we are to see all that there is to see in this vast land. However, as so many adverturers that make there assult on the summit, we came unstuck. We grew tired of the corrogations and the monotonious tarain,  so we decided to turn back short of the goal and head toward the Atherton tablelands instead. (There is quite a distance in Queensland's pointy hat from Cooktown leading up to Cape York) Soon after our about face, our bike rack came unstuck. Nor are we sure quite where its unstuckness struck, as it was mounted on the end of the camping trailer and not on the truck (This is becoming slightly too Dr Seuss esk, but the butt of the joke is that we did not hear them go. From the butt of the trailer that is...(To all those who puzzle themselves wheather there is a sound of the tree falling in the forest where there is no one to hear it fall. Well that sound is reverberating throughout God's great unknown along with the sound of our bikes falling off the back of our camping trailer!) Here is a picture of where our bikes used to be. I think it looks rather more tidy now.

Here is the before shot with the droopy rack that we had repaired in Cooktown

And to finish off this post here are a few nature shots that came our way during the day.

Elim Beach

Setting out from Cooktown about 1/2 a days drive northward, we diverted towards the east coast from the highway, heading for Elim beach. We first stopped off at a small indigenous community (Who's name absolutely escapes me) about 40km from the beach where we thought that we needed to get a permit. Apparently permits went by the wayside some months earlier. We were given instructions about how to get there and when we arrive and to pay 'Eddie' for a camping site.

Driving out it became clear that we were getting more and more remote, even the gravel road giving way to a sandy based rut that was about door height deeper than the tundra. Another indication was the increase in abandoned vehicles that had had one too many floggings littered the sidlings here and there.

Coming to the ocean we eventually found Eddies camp, a building or two with a very home made feel, (I am being kind) a water tank and a satellite dish. In a moment or two Eddie appeared. He was quite something to behold. An indigenous gent who might have been fifty years just as easily as he could have been a hundred. He looked at our rig and thought that we should take a look at the spots down by the shore line (because we might fit between the palms)

I came to admire Eddie as he clearly had business acumen and entrepreneurial skill. Recognising that a certain subset of traveler despised those who own a 4WD and yet never let it off the pavement and onto the real country out woop woop. Yet those very same travelers like a certain degree of creature comforts (or as I suspect without the slightest shred of evidence, that the only way that those guys wives will accompany them into the back of beyond, is if at the end of the day, that the road filth and grot can be washed off and they can become civilised once more.) Eddie meets this balance perfectly. He builds showers out of corrugated iron and installs a water filtration system to the local stream that works when the tide is out. However, that was about all, as to go any further might take the wild out of the place.

Talking with Eddie was also a great education. A skillful conversationalist, he would scope out where your passions might lay and feed into those. For instance, to a well to do traveler he might talk of how he never took any handouts, worked for every thing he had and that he despised other indigenous, slating them as lazy and needing to learn how to work. To one of the wives he might drop in that he was married to a Scotswoman who had since died, leaving one to imagine what living with him must have been like, and that she must have been the making of this extraordinary fellow or he the death of her. To me as a Kiwi, he might talk about Jonah Lomo, a giant umong men and how his skill at Rugby exceeded all of the skill of any Wallaby that he could remember. After a chat with Eddie, everyone went away happy, including Eddie who seemed to have a steady flow of travelers rolling through his gate. Eddie was a traditional fisherman, a hunter of crocs at some time in the past - I think that this part of his story was to allay the fears of his guests that would camp between the mangroves. ' There are no crocs here. There used to be, but I shoot them with my 303, so then they all clear out. They know, crocs are smart! there is one way up there at the other end of the beach, but not at my camp...I wouldn't go swimming in the mother ocean though...' Most of all Eddie was a character and he made our three days there memorable.

We came to Elim beach to enjoy the beauty of the famous coloured sands which are considered to be among the best in the world. but so enjoyed Eddies camp that we never quite made it along to see them. Instead we had a wonderful time in our Kayak, exploring the shoreline at Eddie's camp or chatting to other travelers. Later we learned from other travelers that the coloured sand canyon was the highlight of there trip and I am kicking myself that we never spent half a day there as well. It just goes to show that you need to stop and spend time smelling the roses even when you are on holiday.