Cooktown

Last year’s floods following Cyclone Jasper destroyed many of the roads in this region, and there are a lot of roads with only one lane open. As a result, the road from Daintree to Cooktown is not currently available for buses, so we needed to go back to Mossman and take the inland road to Cooktown. This took most of the day.

After we got back to Mossman, we drove through even more cane fields as we went further north.

But soon the fertile wet tropics made way to savannah.

We passed the most productive tungsten mine outside China.

At lunch, we stopped at the Lion’s Den - a typical outback pub. In the Jasper floods, the tavern had been 3.5 metres under, and six people were rescued by helicopter from its roof, as commemorated by the signs in the photos.

Eventually we reached Cooktown, where our first stop was a museum in a building that was originally a convent which taught girls. The children lived in.

The museum had a lot of Cook memorabilia, including the main anchor and a cannon which they threw overboard when they were wrecked on the reef and were trying to free the Endeavour from the reef. 

It was quite an interesting place, with lots of other exhibits, but it mainly concentrated on Cook (as does the whole town).

I took a walk along the path on the bank of the Endeavour River (where we were told salt water crocodiles have recently killed people)

and saw the exact place where Captain Cook landed (in the middle of mangroves - a great place for crocs), 

a couple of statues dedicated to him, and the place where ships landed to build a path to the Palmer goldfields.