That got us onto the subject of places to refuel, a matter that suggested a certain degree of paranoia on the part of our blonde Brazilian, who seemed to have a dread of roads where petrol stations were few and far between based on some experience of driving across the Mato Grosso or somewhere similar.
We were away from Licuala Lodge before they were, but an attempt to have us rejoin the highway at El Arish rather than Tully had us doing a U-turn to get back on the more appropriate route. Having hit it, I thought the car ahead of us looked familiar (as in the one that had been parked next to ours five minutes before). That, in turn, prompted speculation about whether they’d turn into Tully to check out the Gumboot that distracted me from keeping an eye out for Bikini Trees.
As it turned out, the car in question did turn off at Tully, but since we didn’t do the same I’ve got no idea whether the Gumboot was on the agenda.
With breakfast under the belt, there was no need to stop in Cardwell and, in any case, by the time we were half way between Euramo and Kennedy we were driving through drizzle.
That raised the question of whether we’d be stopping at the lookout at the top of the Cardwell Range, and the on again, off again, will it be raining when we get there discussion took us through the beachfront town and much of the way to the final run up to the crest of the recent reconstruction.
We went up through a patch of almost sun, reached the turn off without spatters on the windscreen and pulled up to find it wasn’t raining.
At the moment. But it was by the time we left five minutes later.