Tuesday, 15 May 2012
And this, folks is where the adventure begins.
As previously indicated, I'd been in touch with the Quinkan Cultural Centre to see what the go was as far as guided tours of rock art sites were concerned, and had been informed that the only one accessible at the moment was Split Rock but I should call back the day before we arrived in case there were any developments in the meantime.
Now, we should have made that call while we were down on the coast and in range of the Virgin Mobile network, but that detail had slipped by in the pursuit of pie shops in towns which might have names starting with W, and we were walking out of the Rainforest Canopy Walk when Madam asked whether I thought I should ring.
Well, it was fairly obvious that I should, but in the car park at Mamu there wasn't a signal, so we figured it'd be better if we waited till we were close to a slightly larger centre (Atherton, for example) but by the time we were there Mickey's big hand was getting awfully adjacent to the twelve with the little hand hovering just before five, so I reckoned it wasn't worth trying.
Better, I thought, to call from a pay phone somewhere en route in the morning. The Palmer River Roadhouse seemed like an obvious choice since it would be easy for people on the other end of the line to calculate a likely arrival time. More on that matter anon.
The first consideration on the day, however, was breakfast. Something at the motel or get on the road and grab something along the way? No brainier. We had the car packed after a good night's sleep and we were pulling out of the car park at the motel just before eight.