We have just returned from several grueling weeks trekking to the northernmost tip of the Australian continent. It was great fun (I think).

You have not experienced 'remote' until you have experienced the Cape. The roads are conservatively a 'MINUS 20' on a scale of 1 to 10. Telephones are few and far between. Most camping in the Cape is bush camping which means a tent with no water and no toilets in the middle of nowhere, along rivers infested by Estuarine Crocodiles and under trees with fruit bats suffering from diarrhea at night. And forget e-mail. The internet is woefully beyond reach here. Plus the weather is hot, hot, hot.

Tempted to join us any time soon?

I am posting (again) from the Lotus Bird Lodge near Musgrave if you can even FIND it on a map. This isolated birding lodge is a haven of gentility in the midst of a rugged outback populated by extreme macho red necks. We have many good friends here now so we came back to the lodge to rest for a few days. The manager, Phil, is kindly posting this note for me because tomorrow morning we leave for Laura and Cairns (eventually) where internet cafes are actually going to be available for a change. Once there I will spend a day or two writing reports and uploading more digital images for the website.

From Cairns we will start winding our way back down the east coast to Sydney. There will be lots to experience and photograph along the way.

You will see from my digital images that the term 'road to hell' was coined here in Queensland. The Old Telegraph Road, as it is affectionately called, is one rugged 4-wheel drive and the it is the ONLY route to the northernmost tip of the Cape York peninsula. It took us more than 10 hours to travel 280 kilometers on roads that were often no more than 12 foot deep crevices and erosion holes with scores of deep and tricky river crossings to negotiate in between. I have by now lost count of the total number of rivers that we've crossed by car here on the Cape, but on one day alone last week it included 17 separate crossings!

They don't build bridges here. When you come up to a river you just CROSS IT in your 4WD vehicle! Nicole had a snorkel installed on the Land Rover just for this purpose, in case the water level in these rivers ever reached above the engine level. The snorkel is a large air intake hose that snakes up past the windshield. As navigator/photographer I was elected to wade on foot across each river with camera held high above my head so that I could get to the other side to photograph the Land Rover doing the impossible. Now this is really no big deal until you realize that every body of water here is pregnant with crocodiles - the warning signs posted everywhere!

The landscape is dotted with abandoned, completely totalled 4WD vehicles which just didn't make it.

We have had to camp a few times here but we have been able to stay most nights along the Old Telegraph Road in outlandishly crude cabins with no a/c or lights...just rickety cots and moldy pillows. But this is definitely better than bush camping in my opinion, simply because I at least get the feeling, whether real or not, that I am temporarily safe from bugs and fruit bats and crocs and such things. I am not exaggerating here.

We have had some stellar photographic experiences to date and we will have an interesting and at times glorious story to tell about this hugely unpopulated continent when we leave here. Compared to the United States with its 250 million people, Australia is roughly the same size with only 18 million people! You wouldn't believe the endless stretches of magnificent beaches and pristine forests with nary a house or 'for sale' sign visible anywhere.