Tag Archive for "Cooktown"
Whilst my week in the historic Far North Queensland town of Cooktown was for work, I did get some time to have a bit of a look around. When I first got there on the Sunday I had a walk down the riverfront and around the town and my work finished up early on the Thursday afternoon so I had a couple of hours of daylight to walk up to the lighthouse on Grassy Hill and then take the path down to Cherry Tree Bay, across to Finch Bay and back through the Botanical Gardens.
I then had enough time to drive back up Grassy Hill for sunset and take some photos for a time-lapse movie. It got dark quicker than expected so I adjusted my camera settings after a few minutes to make the images lighter and capture more of the sunset. You might be able to see this in the movie about 3 seconds in, when despite the setting sun it becomes slightly lighter.
Work took me up to Cooktown in Far North Queensland for a week. Although it’s a short flight from Cairns to Cooktown I decided to take the more leisurely drive up there. I don’t mind flying but when work takes me away from Brisbane I prefer to drive, take in the scenery and have a look around.
The road from Cairns to Mossman follows the coastline, with some spectacular views over the sea and, as such, it’s a pretty slow road, full of Sunday drivers admiring the scenery. From Mossman there are two options; keep going on the coast road through Cape Tribulation and Wujal Wujal or take the inland road. As the coast road is 4×4 only, with my hire car I only had the choice of the inland road, the final section of which was only sealed in 2006.
The road runs through the hills across to Mount Molloy, and then arcs northwards through Lakeland to Cooktown. The road is pretty fast unless you get stuck behind caravans, RVs or trucks, all of which struggle for speed on the hills. As the road is windy and has a lot of dips it can be difficult to overtake slow moving vehicles. In the end, both the trip up and back took almost 4½ hours to cover the 327km as opposed to about a ½ hour each way if I had flown.
