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 16th June 2026: left the Jardine Motel and went on the 9.30am Peddell’s Thursday Island tour. We visited the cemetery to see the graves of the at least 600 to 700  Japanese Pearl divers.who dived between 1878 and 1941, mainly dying from the bends. We saw the grave of Bernard  Namok who designed the Torres Strait’s flag. We saw the Wongai tree, with berries used in herbal medicines. We then headed up Grass Hill, where a power outage meant that we were unable to visit the museum, however Christine our bus driver and guide told us many interesting things about TI. We then caught a Time and Tide ferry over to Horn Island. We walked to our Wongai Beach Hotel where we rested for a while then headed for the Museum as a preliminary to tomorrow and history tour with Vanessa and Liberty Seekee. It was a fascinating museum about WW 2 on Horn Island and the role of the principally Islander Light Infantry division -810 volunteers out of total population of 3000.. We ate at the hotel ...
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 15th June 2026: up early to move our Prado and caravan to the guest car park and meet our driver at 6.45am. He was a member of staff at Punsand Bay - a Chilean who had been working there for 4 days! However he drove the roads well to Seisia to drop us off at the ferry to Thursday Island, a trip that took about an hour on calm aquamarine waters!  We decided on a coffee and croissant and met a nice couple Ellen & John from Brampton Beach visiting their son John and his wife Eliana who live on TI with their 2 boys. John told us about an historical tour run on Horn Is called “In their footsteps” run by Vanessa Seekee , which we will do. We dropped our packs at the Jardine Motel and then went  the Gab Titui Cultural Centre to learn something of TI culture and history. There was an exhibition of photographs by a Japanese geographer and anthropologist Professor George Ohshima 50 years ago when his team did an extensive cultural and geographical survey of the all of Torres S...
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 14th June 2026: had a relaxed morning with time for breakfast, a coffee and to watch Insiders. We set off for the Tip of Cape York, stopping at the Croc Tent at the Pusand Bay turnover to purchase some Cape York Merch in the form of T-shirts and shirts. We then took the Pajinka Road to the tip of Cape York through the wonderful Lockerbie Forest- a mixture of dense tropical rain forest with areas where trees had been thinned out ? For cattle grazing in the past. We saw horses, 3 wild pigs and several scrub turkeys along the way. The Lockerbie Forest is special because it contains certain species of vegetation, butterflies and birds otherwise only found in New Guinea, whose antecedents must have come from Gondwana times when there was a land bridge between PNG and Australia. From the car park there was a 700 meter walk over rocks to get to the very Tip of Cape York. On the left were extensive mudflats and mangroves when the tide was out and on the right rocky steep cliffs. It was ve...
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 13th June 2026: unbelievably, we found ourselves heading for Pusand Bay today, despite all setbacks! Left Bramwell Station Tourist Park by 9 am and headed onto the Bamaga Road. The first 2 hours were a bit rough as the road was full of corrugations, but we drove slowly, communicating with those who wished to fly past us via UHF, indicating we would pull over and slow down if required! The remains of our Telstra Extender , with its stripped thread, and from which we removed the antenna last night, finally vibrated off, but was hanging by a wire! We stopped and I taped it down using the extra-strong T-Rex version of duct tape!  We reached Fruit Bat Falls but decided to keep going and visit the Falls on the way back down! After that the road improved somewhat, with stretches of bitumen. The vegetation was more tropical with grass trees and fan palms We saw another monitor lizard on the road which we managed to avoid hitting. We got to Jardine River Ferry by 12.45pm and had to wa...
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 12th June 2026: up early again to be at Tyre Power by 7 am. The actual tyre fitting went well- 2 new Toyo  all terrain tyres. We left Weipa at about 9am and heading for Bramwell Station Tourist Park via the Peninsular Development Road, which is alternating gravel and bitumen, with some dips and corrugations. We took the Batavia Downs Road shortcut to join the Telegraph Road, which was in better order than the Developmental Road.. We then had Batavia Nation Park to the right and the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve to the left. We saw a very big monitor lizard on the road? About 5 feet long. We saw large pointed termite mounds with buttressing on all sides. We reached Bramwell Station Tourist Park at about 1 pm. Nic set out to tighten any loose screws on the van and discovered that the caravan’s 2 shock absorbers were hanging loose. We had met a lovely couple Bec & Wayne from Port Macquarie in Weipa and they were also at Bramwell Station.and Wayne, an ex farmer, was able to co...
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