After the utter beating the Ford has taken – all those river crossings, all that mud, all those rocks – I’m not particularly surprised when something very large and probably quite important falls out from underneath us as we’re zipping south along Queensland’s coastal highway. On the upside, we bottom out just as the funky little town of Mission Beach comes into view up ahead, so I guess if you absolutely must limp in somewhere with your axel (or, like,
whatever the hell that thing is) hanging at a 90-degree angle and making a very bad noise, Mission Beach is as good a place as any to do so.
Surprisingly, we come out of the whole ill-thought-out 19th river-crossing debacle unscathed, with the Hertz guy simply bringing a new car down to us from Cairns and leaving our campsite, no questions asked. Which is SO good 'cause I didn’t want to lie and say that, you know, woopsy-daisy sir, that axel sure did fall off our car but not because we drove it on the 4WD track or anything like that. Ironically, this new car is also a Ford Territory and, now that we don’t need it, the four-wheel drive version.
So all’s well that ends well, it seems. I sense a turning point here. We’re kicking back on this amazing beach, and it’s not raining and we’re sitting outside a dry tent, with cold beer and a warm wind and all these gorgeous stars in a southern sky and I wonder: Could this be the beginning of a proper tropical holiday?
“Out on the patio we’d sit, And the humidity we’d breathe, We’d watch the lightning crack over canefields, Laugh and think, this is Australia.” - Gangajang’s ’80s hit, This Is Australia
