2010/10 Australia trip - Battlecamp Road, Lakefield |
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It stayed dry, so we packed up and drove to the nearby ranger station for some advice. The ranger told us that we’d had 130mm (5 inches) of rain, very unusual for October. She admitted that she hadn’t a clue about road conditions to the south but offered us the usual “No worries mate” to help us on our way.
The first few miles were slow going, with much of the road underwater and very soft as it’s mostly sand anyway. A couple of times the water was deeper than we thought and it came up across the hood and windscreen and over the roof. We were thankful for the diesel engine and the snorkel. But as we got further away from Kalpower things improved, with just puddles and soft spots. We concluded that we’d been lucky and our rain storms had been localized.
There was a lot of traffic coming into the park, some of it in convoys of ancient Land Rovers, with boats on top. It looked like the Australian Army was going fishing.
We stopped at “Old Laura”, a restoration of the original homestead there: more corrugated iron architecture, though from the pictures in the museum it began with coconut matting for a roof, quieter but leaky.
We still had the Laura and Normanby Rivers to cross but needn’t have worried as the Laura was drier than the road and although the Normanby’s bridge was underwater, it was an easy straight crossing. By this time the Troopie’s windshield had gone under a few times and we looked like a blob of mud.
The road improved as we left Lakefield park and passed through Battlecamp Station, a homestead located where a 
battle took place between massed aborigines and the gold miners. Needless to say, gunpowder and rifles won the day.
After Battlecamp we were crossing rows of mountains clothed in rain forest, just us and the ribbon of road. We came to a deep river crossing with a waterfall off to our right and we realized we were at the Isabell River; this is as far as conventional vehicles can go traveling north out of Cooktown. We stopped for lunch and explored the falls, disturbing a large brown snake, something we’d rather not do too often. The falls were pretty with little cascades and pools, a worthwhile stop.