Cape York

[Kyle]From Lizard Island, we made the three-day sail to Cape York. The last time we made this journey, we took a month and stopped a lot. That helped now because it didn’t feel like we were missing a whole lot of good stuff along the way. This time, instead of passing by Cape York in the distance, we decided to pop in and go stand on it.

After landing the dinghy and scrambling up the rocks on the day after we arrived, we did just that. Cape York is surprisingly pretty. I for some reason had expected 10º south to be a bit more sunbaked, but it was pleasantly green. Added to this was a pretty large population of Rainbow Bee Eaters. They are such beautiful little birds.

Cape York itself

After standing on the northernmost point of mainland Australia itself, we decided to go for a little walk inland to the south to stretch our legs. We were mostly looking for birds and hoppy things, but the most interesting thing we came across was a solo camper by the beach in his ute, whose camp we had seen from Begonia.

We wandered inland a bit attempting to find access to a lagoon/lake we could see on the map (Maryanne was hoping to get in some bird-spotting) - but we failed to find a decent trail access

Despite our deliberately making noisy conversation with each other as we approached in an effort not to startle him, he met us face to face in his tighty-whities, with no effort to rush off and find a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. Well, I say tighty-whities, but those things were a long way since white. They were more like a gray wharf rat on color and texture. I think I saw a faded permanent marker label that read “2022”. Oh, dear. What it is about men of a certain age and body shape that seem to think everyone wants to sneak up on Santa in his civvies?