It’s big
It’s open
Its vast
The yellowy brown grassy plain
Stretching to the horizon
Dots of trees and scrub
It’s all big
The distance
Nearly 300k and only one town
Big coal mines
Big road trains
And me zipping along on my motorbike
A speck in time and space.
On the banks of the Endeavour River, in Cooktown, there is an interpretive plaque that says the James Cook and the local aborigines reconciled in 1770.
Was it a reconciliation of convenience? Cook had a damaged ship that needed repair. Or was he open to a deeper understanding.
The rock art on Cape York is evidence of a complex culture many thousands of years old. Some of the carvings in the walls of the Split Rock are estimated to be 13000 years old.
I’m a great admirer of James Cook, – three circumnavigations of the world before his death at 51 in Hawaii.
And know I can learn much from our indigenous culture, it’s spirituality and understanding of place and the land.
In Cape York the two came together.
Rainforest and savanah
Separated by a thin strip of mountains not 1000 metres high.
The deep dark impenetrable rainforest dense green.
The other side of the mountains
The savanah
Open forest
The grass a greeny bronze
Higher than my head.
The savanah and the rainforest each have their own special beauty
Their own special meaning for being.
This is such a breathtakingly beautiful place.
I have travelled from Mission Beach.
Past sugar mills (further in previous post)
Past waterfalls
To Herberton where I will spend the night
It’s the smell
The warm moist fertile smell
Like any thing could grow here
Through central Queensland the smell was dry and dusty
Now it’s moist and you can smell and taste it
The tropical forests bring there interesting dangers
Even the plants
And of course there is the sugar cane. Been with me since the sub tropics.
It’s harvest time and sometimes the air is sickly sweet with the smell of sugar syrup especially near a mill grinding the cane
The tropics and sugar cane are synonymous for me.
Be it tropical Queensland, Mauritius, the Mekong Delta, the moist highlands of Ethiopia near the source of the Nile or South Pacific Islands, sugar cane was always there.
Being on a motorbike I’m in the moment, part of the environment, and experiencing the smells is part of it.
