The campground at Seisia was definitely an exciting prospect. Not only did it offer beach-side camping overlooking a beautiful vista of lightly-blue colored water and the islands of the Torres Strait, but it also possessed at its entrance a restaurant & kiosk dispensing, among other things, food we did not have to cook for ourselves. Our enthusiasm was real.

We set up camp as quickly as we could and hungrily strode over – thinking of hamburgers thick with onions, beets, fried eggs, and whatever else they would be willing to stuff in there – but only a couple of seconds after seating ourselves at a table were informed they were no longer serving that evening.

“Why not?” Glen said.

“We close at eight, mate.”

It was two minutes past.

“We just wanted a few burgers, whatever you are willing to make.”

“No!”

Dejected, we slinked back to camp to make whatever we could scrounge together, and spent the remainder of the evening filling the void in our stomachs with our newly acquired beers, and complaining about our aforementioned bistro.

The complaining, proportionally with beer consumed, became more belligerent throughout the night. Then, with a serious face, Sue paused; “Tomorrow let’s go earlier,” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t know about you, but I want a burger.”

I gave this a little thought. She was right. What else could we do, really? Not eat burgers? No, that wouldn’t do. So we would forgive them this one occurrence of punctuality in exchange for a helping of the meaty morsels of our desires.

We got up early the next morning to head out to the tip. It was supposed to be a quick 40 km trip, but it took us well over an hour. Getting lost repeatedly, I suspect, had something to do with this. The thing is, it was easy; there is just one road that goes up to the tip. But because we tried to be cleaver and intersect it from a road out of Bamaga, we thought we were lost and kept turning around. Finally, we stopped by a military outpost and Glen jumped out to ask where the hell we were.

“Yeah, we’re right, mate,” He said, getting back into the car. “They just said that we follow this track up and it intersects the main track.”

Wonderful.

And they were right. Just another 30 kilometers and we arrived to the car park at the tip. We pulled in, and aimed for a spot in front of two trees. I guess the excitement of it all overwhelmed me, because my mind lapsed, and I forgot we had no brakes. I pushed the pedal, and we kept on going. “Uh oh”. We sailed right past the parking spot and, incredibly, squeezed in-between two trees.

“We’ll just leave it here,” I said, smiling a bit from the unexpected excitement and surveying the scene to make sure we didn’t actually hit the trees. We didn’t. But it was that close.