2010/10 Australia trip - Bypass roads and Jardine River |
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We were off on our last major day of driving to get to the Cape. We began by driving alongside the Steve Irwin Wildlife Preserve, presumably named after him after he died back in 2006. Our last junction was at Bramwell, where we had to choose between the Old Telegraph Track and the Bypass Roads.
The OTT is dead straight, following the original line of the telegraph poles, but it is not maintained much and it includes a succession of difficult and sometimes dangerously steep creek crossings. There are two Bypass roads, the Southern and Northern; these avoid the creek crossings, preferring to go around their watersheds. As we wanted to get there and back again without getting everything soaked we were taking the Bypass roads. Not that they are any picnic, but they are at least nominally maintained.
The main danger of all the roads is their unpredictability: one minute you’re cruising on a wide flat and smooth gravel pad, and next minute you are crashing around bends on a severe washboard, only to come out into a bathtub chute where it’s easy to stay in the bottom of the chute but scary when you meet someone in the chute coming from the other direction. The colour of the road would change from red to yellow to purple to white depending on the where the gravel had come from. I think the purple gravel came with the corrugations already installed. The mottled sections made it hard to spot rocks and holes. The washboard was so bad in some places that Sandie found it smoother to drive in the ditch.
The Southern Bypass road passes through the Heathlands Reserve, an area of stunted trees, nothing more than about 15 feet high, so no shade. It had some interesting plants though, a completely bare dead looking tree [kurrajong] covered with pink blossoms, and a little white shrub, similar to a poinsettia, with tiny white flowers and large white bracts [mussuenda].
We stopped for lunch at Fruit Bat Falls, down a narrow red track through the forest, dodging the trees. It’s an absolutely 
gorgeous spot, with the creek dropping a few feet over a wide falls. The water is at about body temperature. It’s the kind of “wilderness cascade” that gets built into the swimming pools of upscale resorts, but they can never capture anything as good as the real thing. Crocodiles? It was a Saturday, and we assumed that crocs work to union rules.
The Northern Bypass Road was more of the same, maybe even bumpier than the Southern, but I slept through most of it. It took us to the ferry crossing of the Jardine River, where they extracted $88 from us for a return ticket. Supposedly this also covered our bush camping charges while we are north of the Jardine, but 
there may be other hands dipping in too. What makes it worse is that the ferry barely has to move; if they had two ferries we could just have driven across without them moving!
There used to be a ford crossing of the river, but it’s not allowed anymore, too many accidents, and people had been killed by crocs there too.
Despite the charge for camping there were no clues as to where to camp, and it took us while to find the old tracks around the ford crossing, also no longer maintained. The tracks had almost disappeared but by now we were used to letting the Troopie find its own way down the ravines.
The first campsite we came to was right at river level and very dark under the trees, not a safe 
combination, but the second was perfect, ten feet above the river with a good view and a cooling breeze. The Jardine is a really big river even in the Dry season. During the Wet it fills the entire gorge and overflows across the countryside. We’d noticed that some of the termite mounds are multicolored, due we thought to successive floods bringing different coloured muds to the area.
We saw no sign of crocs, other than their chutes down the sandbars, but people have been taken and eaten all along the Jardine so we weren’t taking any chances.
Sunday October 10th
We took our time in the morning as we didn’t have far to go. Still, finding the way out took us a while and we visited most of the other campsites on the river before we found the track out. The undergrowth around the track had been burned and some of it was still burning. Periodic burn-offs are standard management practice in the north, but they can really spoil your camping experience if you are downwind!