We were, however, compensated in a way on the walk back to camp in the form of a cuscus; a furry little mammal that resides up in leafy canopy of the forest. Well, actually, I can’t really confirm his furriness, or even if it actually was as cuscus, as we only saw a silhouette with eyes aglow from our torches. But I would like to think it was. And this, I found, was in the right spirit; if we couldn’t actually see endangered animals, we would at least hype ourselves into thinking we did. It worked brilliantly.

“This is Scaevola,” Glen was saying, plucking a leaf off of the light green bush adorning the edge of the beach. “You can take these young leaves out of here, boil them up, and use them like cabbage or spinach.”

“Mmmmmmm,” I said, a touch insincerely.

“There’s a book, Wild Foods of Australia, and it describes Scaevola as edible, but not palatable.” He laughed, and, throwing the leaf aside, “I think that says it all about Scaevola.”

We were at Chili beach, a 20 kilometer day trip from Iron Range. The beach wasn’t one of the best of the trip. Then again, our beach assessments were beginning to be unequivocally fastidious; we had seen some of the most beautiful expanses of sand Australia had to offer, and anything amounting to less was almost agonizing.

To be fair, the beach was – using our guidebooks apt description – “wide and long and fringed with palms, truly a magical spot”. But it was equally, if slightly less magically, studded with trash. And if this wasn’t enough of a deterrent against swimming, the waters were also infested with crocs. But from a safe distance it did look picturesque.

And perhaps most importantly, the Land Rover really did look great with the tropical background of beach and fringing palms. Overall though, it was a bit of a disappointment.

We set out from Iron Range on the final leg of our trip; a quick jaunt south on the Portland Roads Road to the Peninsula Developmental Road, through Archer River, Coen, and Musgrave, where we would hang a left and go through Lakefield National Park into Cooktown. From Cooktown, we were going to take the CREB track to Daintree, and from there the main road the last few kilometers back to Port. It didn’t take long, as you may have already guessed, for the plan to fall to shambles.

The day started as any other; us making good time on the four wheel drive track and stopping off for interesting points. The first of the stops was at a river crossing just outside of Iron Range, where there were the remnants of an old stone bridge from WWII. The whole area around Iron Range was very active during this time, with a lot of airfields and barge landing points, so it is not surprising to find such remnants of the mineral links.

Driving down the track a little further, we were suddenly enveloped in a thick plume of smoke. I checked to make sure it wasn’t the car. No. Happily, it was only a bush fire. We stopped to have a closer look. We stepped out and, keeping to the road to avoid an unanticipated charring, watched as the fire made its way through the forest. The sound of the crackling was awfully loud, and every gust of wind sent the raging inferno into a hysterical tango over the unwisely-flammable plants before.