Day 16 – Sat, 17 Jul back to Port Douglas

Well today broke sunny and fine and this saw the last of the gravel roads for this part of the trip. We headed out at what now seems the usual time of around 9am after a leisurely breakfast looking forward to some R&R in Port Douglas tonight.

Well it only took us a minute or so to be brought quickly back to reality when we hit the horrendous Peninsula Development Road; the overnight break did not see any road improvements. It is such that you cannot pick a decent line, with ruts and rocks and loose gravel all over the place. We thought we had 60km of this but thankfully it was interspersed with bitumen and improvements ready for surfacing.

The very last 150m with bitumen insight was probably the worst with so many ruts and loose stuff that the bikes were giving that many shakes we both thought it would be ……….. (a few expletives are now appropriate).   When we got to the Lakeland Roadhouse (which is basically at the start of the road N) we spoke to a young guy who had just returned from the Cape and his comments were that the road deteriorated even worse – thankfully we did not tackle the Cape.

Anyway we travelled south back to Port Douglas through to Mt Molloy and down the mountain to Mossman for the final short run into Port. The scenery was simply spectacular with the Great Dividing Range to our left and right, with the plain in between about 3-5km across.

The vegetation was tall brown grasses with termite mounds and stunted trees. This is mainly cattle grazing country with some banana plantations and we think passionfruit vines growing on trellis. We sighted a busted (or plains turkey)  just leaving the road as we passed by, this was our second sighting of these birds.

As we approached Mt Molloy we were on the W side with the coast over the range to our E. The sky was bright blue but the large cumulous clouds hung above the range touching the tops of the peaks sitting like large hats on the mountains  - simply stunning.

We turned E at Mt Molloy and this took us back down the 30km road to the coast. This is a great bike road and gave us an opportunity to blow some cobwebs away and clean the outer edges of our tyres.

We checked into the Port-O-Call accommodation, fuelled our bikes, visited Coles for resupply and are now resting beside the pool with some chips and a cold drink. Oh its great to be alive in this country – if you have a dream then just do it.