I made it to the northernmost point in Australia. The last week of travel has been pretty interesting. I’ve camped in a variety of places. Some relatively empty State Park campgrounds, a few of the roadhouses along the road to get up here. I thought that the road would be worse than it is. Lots of corrugations and red dirt but very little gnarly stuff.
Been talking to some Aussies lately and there’s a strange semantic problem. First, lots of places in Australia are going back to their Aboriginal names. So the tip is now Pajinka. But the really interesting one is that people in the know, refer to the very northernmost point as “The Tip”. But in Australian slang a garbage dump is a tip. It’s where you tip your stuff off. So when I tell people that I’ve just returned from the tip some look at me like I’m crazy…”Why the hell do you want to go to the dump??”
When I started writing this I was camped at Loyalty Beach Campground.
It’s pretty empty because the season for this area is really over and everyone has gone home. The restaurant is pretty good. On Sundays they have a fish and chips special and it seems that quite a few folks come from the local area. It was definitely worth going for dinner.
After going to the tip and hiking out to the sign. ( It’s a pretty easy hike across a rocky area.) I decided to go check out some WWII plane crashes. The northern tip of Australia is only 200 km from Papua New Guinea so this was a relatively active area during the Second World War. In fact my father, more or less, ended the war on a ship in Rabaul, New Guinea. So I was kind of interested in seeing some of the relics. I’ll just post a bunch of pictures. The airport is a kind of cool, small, one runway airport in approximately the same place where there was a WWII airport.
The first wreck was a Curtiss Warhawk fighter bomber. There is a significant amount of debris in a small area in the jungle.
Not far away is the crash of an Australian made bomber. I looked up this crash. It turns out that the plane took off and had some problems so they were trying to return and land. No one died in the crash.
On the road in to the Beaufort Bomber there’s the remains of a fuel dump from that time. Hundreds of metal 55 gallon drums left abandoned in the jungle. I don’t have any idea how the managed fuel in those days but obviously some of it was brought to the airport in drums. Somehow, I found this to be pretty interesting. I could imagine a bunch of 20 year old Aussies in uniform pants and no shirts rolling these drums around in the jungle and moving them up to the edge of the runway to fuel whatever planes were coming in. The Japanese had a relatively strong presence in New Guinea up until late in the war so it’s easy to understand why there was so much Australian and American activity around here. There were some pretty big airbases only 3-400 km south of here.
While out at the tip I talked to an Australian guy who has some kind of family history in Papua New Guinea. Maybe it is his grandmother who’s in Papua New Guinea. I don’t remember the details of that part of his story. He had just taken a small (5 meter) open boat across the straights to Papua New Guinea. He said that the trip was pretty rough because it was windy. But he was able to hop from island to island to make it all of the way across. That’s a significant adventure. He took his young daughter with him and one of his cousins who is probably 20 – 25 years old. Hard to imagine when you see these catamarans just anchored in the cove at the northern end.
The general area around the north of Cape York is quite beautiful and I'm really glad I made it up there. Maybe I should have spent a few more days. But I've been thinking that I've got to get south to avoid some of the heat. Onward!
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