From Cairns we headed to Cooktown on Cape York Peninsula, stopping for awhile just to the north of Cairns at beautiful Palm Cove. This is a great palm-fringed sandy beach lined with modern apartments. This would be a great place for a quiet beach holiday and many people here were having just that. But we carried on to Cooktown about 350 km to the north where we stayed for nearly a week, walking and fishing. This was our first visit to Cooktown and we were pleasantly surprised by the place. It is a more substantial town than we were expecting and it is located at a physically beautiful spot where the wide mangrove-fringed Endeavour River flows into the Coral Sea. In 1770, Lt James Cook on board his ship the HM Bark Endeavour was in desperate need of safe haven and he beached the vessel here, naming the river after his ship. The ship and crew remained here for seven weeks while repairs were carried out. On board was the botanist Joseph Banks and staff who busied themselves collecting Australian flora specimens. Surprisingly for a town of its relatively small size, Cooktown has its own botanical garden with one section containing specimens of all the trees and bushes collected and described by Banks.Cooktown had its heyday 100 years after Cook was here when alluvial gold was discovered on the Palmer River in the 1870s, sparking a regional gold rush. The town’s population swelled to several thousand to service the approximately 15,000 people on the goldfields. Like most gold rushes, few prospectors struck it rich and the only ones to make a fortune were the hotel keepers and carriers. A legacy of the gold rush days are some very fine colonial buildings particularly the hospital that functioned for a century after opening in the late 1870s and is now a Jehovah’s Witness Church.
We fished at nearby Archer Point, battling strong winds and keeping a close eye on the water’s edge as salt water crocodiles live along the whole coast and river banks here.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/30/2378215.htm
Fortunately we saw no crocs but we did see several sea turtles cruising around the bay. We caught some good fish including a large mangrove jack and silver trevally, and Lee Tuan hauled in what looked a lot like a monster garfish and which we later identified as a Long Tom.
We stayed at a motel/backpackers joint, sharing the kitchen each night with an interesting group of people including young Japanese and German visitors who were working as pickers in a nearby banana plantation to save extra money before moving south to snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef and to hike in the Daintree Rainforest. Cooktown has a very pleasant laid-back atmosphere and the air was warm despite it now being mid-winter. No doubt, though, it can get very uncomfortable here in the height of summer. We looked longingly at a detailed map of Cape York Peninsula to the north and the many seemingly interesting places we had never heard of, and the great fishing spots that must exist along the 1,000 km of coastline between here and Cape York, the most northerly point in Australia. The Peninsula is 14 million hectares of savanna country and rainforest, with 21 big wild rivers that feed vast wetlands and mangroves. You could spend months here and barely scratch the surface.
