We packed up and left Punsand Bay, bidding farewell to Dwayne and co who had a long drive ahead of them. We had a very different drive - half an hour, which I think is one of our shortest distances yet!
To kill some time (there is air conditioning in the car and not in the tent...) we cruised through Bamaga and went to check out some more WWII relics. Bamaga was an airfield and there are a few wrecks still hanging about. We stopped by a Bristol Beaufort Bomber and a DC3, both of whom crashed near the airfield and have been left in the jungle where they landed. This time there was rather a lot more to see, as these wrecks haven't been scavenged like the ones near Darwin.
We also got to experience the unique wildlife of Bamaga. The entire town is populated with wild horses. It's hard to work out if they are feral, wild brumbies or pets, but they are EVERYWHERE, quite fearless and all look rather scrawny. There were signs up in the Loyalty Beach campground asking that we didn't feed the horses as they can bite, but I think they could all do with a damn good feed of some sort! They all just wander around: individually, in pairs, with foals or in whopping great herds. It's quite mesmerising at times, though also a little unsettling to be doing some laundry and have a horse wander up and stick its head in the trough!
We got a prime site at Loyalty Beach. Being there so late in the season, and getting there so early in the day, there were only 3 other sites taken. We got to have a huge shelter and it's electric light for the price of an unpowered site so we were all happy. Mind you, I think we used the light for all of 15 minutes each night. LOL.
We were also very pleased to see Paul and Stephanie and to hear that they had been fully paid out for their "totalled" camper trailer. They had bought a tent and blow up mattress, were based here for a week or so and were intending on loading their car on the barge and going back to Cairns the easy way. What a good idea! They had driven from Fremantle across almost the whole of Australia via the "shortcut" and were all of 80km from the tip when they lost their trailer. How devastating for them.
We had a relaxing couple of days chilling out. Dunc and Angus went fishing again and Lexie lay in the hammock and read another 2 or 3 books. I had loaded up her Kobo before we left, and we decided not to bring any physical books to cut down on packing. She seemed determined to get through the entire lot in the 2 weeks or so we had up here! I'd loaded up most of Jacqueline Wilson's books and James Patterson's Maximum Ride series and she is now mad keen on both. I'd also included Mathew Riley's "Hover Car Racer" which Dunc and I had both enjoyed. It took us DAYS to convince her to read it, and then she wouldn't put it down or listen to a word we said as soon as she started it. Typical kid!
I wrote all of the blog entries you've just been reading! My blog relationship is very fluid. I usually write in the mornings, and do pics and uploading at night. But if we have friends around, the nighttime chores get skipped. So when we were with Dwayne and Anna, not much was done. My Facebook updates increase and my blog updates decrease in a direct proportion! Right this very second, we are back down at Bertha and live on the blog the latest entry is about climbing Uluru! I didn't take either laptop (they need power) so used my iPad and have written 13 entries during the 2 weeks we were camping. Now I just need to sort and resize the photos and get somewhere where there is phone service to upload them all...
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