We left the Daintree early. We almost had a stowaway, a lost dog tried unsuccessfully to enter our campervan. After some mucking around, unable to find the owner we convinced a shop keeper to look after her.

So with dog sorted we hit the road for Cooktown. First stop was Mount Carbine. Let's say it consists of a pub and fuel station … that is it.

There are two ways to Cooktown, the coastal route and the inland route. We could not take the coastal route because we have only a two wheel drive camper … so we headed for the inland route. The inland route reminded us a lot of Northern Territory as we left rainforest for tablelands and started seeing road trains. Reminded us a lot of our trip last year through the NT.

There is no doubt that Far North Queensland has no shortage of lookouts and we stopped at nearly all of them. There really is spectacular scenery here and you really do not get sick of it. Before long we hit Palmer River Road House. This area became famous in the 1870s when gold was discovered here. This place became home to over 18,000 chinese people. You can still visit Maytown which is now a ghost town accessible by four wheel drive only and 80ks from the main road. They rate the road to Maytown as "extremely difficult" … so a two wheel drive six berth campervan is out of the question! BTW Palmer River Road House has a cool little museum about gold in the area and also the early days of cattle and trucks in the area.

The Palmer River Road House was a great stop, especially for Olivier who took great delight in finding his much beloved "Camel Balls" candy he found so funny in the NT last year! Fuel and all drinked up we pushed on. We went through Lakeland and did not stop.

Soon we were at Black Mountain. Spooky place. The mountain is made of thousands of stacked black granite boulders. This mountain also marks the end of the wet tropics. There are lots of stories and myths about this place from large herds of cattle going missing on the mountain to pilots refusing to fly over it because of unexplained turbulence. Regardless of the stories this is a great place to stop and look at this remarkable place.

So first stop when we arrived in Cooktown? The caravan park pool of course. Our campsite is amazing, small but well appointed. Late afternoon we headed to the Grassy Hill and soaked in the amazing 260 degree views. We saw where Captain Cook landed and also the statue of him to honour his time at Cooktown. More on that tomorrow as I have assigned the boys a task to write about Cook's time here for tomorrow night's blog to their disgust.

The highlight of the day was sharing a spectacular sunset with the family at the site where Captain Cook landed.