Day 7: 23/8/25, Chilligoe to Cairns.

 Day 7: 23/8/25,  Chilligoe to Cairns.

From Chilligoe we travelled to the outskirts of Cairns, a further 200Km east (and for our UK friends, we are now at the base of Cape York Peninsula and still about 1,000Km (600 miles) from the top of Australia). We aren’t going any further north, next we travel (by coach) west across to Karumba on the Gulf of Carpentaria and then a mixture of train and coach (because the train lines have been washed away by floods) to get back to Cairns in about 6 days.

For anyone who hasn’t been up here, there is virtually no telephone coverage outside of major cities (and I don’t mean places like Chilligoe where none of us had any service) and the only means of communication is either UHF radio (CB), (at best probably about 20Km), Sat phone or Short wave radio (neither of which we have) or the camping grounds WIFI {you might get an emergency SOS through if you are really lucky}, you really are on your own and at the mercy of fellow travellers and truckies if something goes wrong, and we are not that remote yet, Chiiligoe, for instance, is 200Km west of Cairns (not that much), but 1,846Km north west of Brisbane and 1,000Km from the NT border.

We have since discovered that Telstra 5G is available in some of the bigger towns, something we will have to look into when we travel up this way again. 

No photos for today, tomorrow we will visit some of the sites of Cairns.

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