2010/10 Australia trip - Punsand Bay |
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We set off back down the road heading for the Croc Tent junction when we spotted a sign for a road to Punsand Bay, a
perfect short cut. Ha! What a sense of humour. The road soon became a track, with a ravine down its centre and then became really bad for the climb over the mountain, and even worse for the drop down the other side. We’d sighed with relief as it flattened out, and then we were into deep fluffy sand. Now, for driving in sand you’re supposed to drop the tyre pressures to about a third of normal, and drive in a low enough gear to keep moving, but we daren’t stop to make adjustments, so we drove for a mile or two with hard tyres and too high a gear, barreling up and down dunes and weaving in and out between trees, trying to pick the most favourable of a half dozen parallel tracks. Amazingly we got away with it, with no stalls or any tree whacking. We had the recovery gear to get out if we got stuck but we were glad not to have to use it. The other end of the track carried the warning “Extremely rough track 4wd only”.
We were at Punsand Bay, a very laid back resort on the beach. It has a laundry, pool, bar, and restaurant. It was also a place for us to get cleaned up after a week of bush camping and take on more water for our return trip. We camped facing out onto the sea, a perfect beach with palms and white sand. The ocean was a sapphire blue, warm and calm, but there was no one swimming. With deadly jellyfish and the occasional snacking shark or crocodile, the odds are really stacked against the swimmer! Actually, nobody up there even mentions the danger of sharks; they are definitely a distant third on the list of risks.
The bad news from the campground staff was that it was too late in the season for their ferry trips to the Torres Islands. We’d have to go back to Seisia to catch the regularly scheduled ferry to Thursday Island.
As we expected, camping on the beach was extremely humid at night. We both dripped all night and didn’t sleep too well.
Monday October 11th 
Not too much happened on Monday. After twenty days of driving and exploring we were resolved to go nowhere for a day. Sandie hauled all of our clothes off to the laundry and established that it had washers but no dryers, typical for an Aussie campground. I rigged up the full length of our washing line and hoped that the wind would stay up and the showers would stay away. As you can see from the pictures we pretty much had the beach and campground to ourselves.
In the meantime we tried to eat up the foods which would not make it back through the quarantine down south in Coen, According to the Quarantine radio station this seemed to be just about everything that wasn’t in a can, even milk and cheese.
We were determined not to do any driving but it turned out that there is little to do in paradise if you can’t splash around in the water. Neither of us is much good at sunbathing, and we soon exhausted the possibilities of walking up and down the beach.
We found that the water we’d been drinking happily was supposed to be boiled before consumption. We didn’t know though whether the water was actually bad or, as is usually the case, whether no one ever tests it.
We established that the ferry from Seisia to Thursday Island only runs MWF in October so we’d relocate to Seisia the next day, ready for an 8am sailing there on Wednesday.
It was our steamiest night yet. Our latitude at Punsand Bay was about ten degrees south and at school I learned that one minute of latitude is one nautical mile, so we were about 600 nautical miles or 690 statute miles from the equator. Amazing what memories you can drag up while you’re lying there sweating.
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