Hope Vale

Monday 12th June. We drove the 2 hours to Cooktown where we refueled and continued on through Hope Vale. The Lutheran Church originally established the Hope Vale community in 1886 as the Cape Bedford Mission at Elim Beach.
The local Guugu Yimithirr people like all Aborigines in Australia have been here for approximately 100,000 years. The Guugu Yimithirr first came to prominence in 1770 when they engaged with Captain James Cook and his crew on the ship Endeavour. As is known in history, the Guugu Yimithirr hosted Captain Cook at present day Cooktown for 7 weeks. During this time, he not only had to repair the Endeavour he also met the local people and engaged with them along with Joseph Banks and Sydney Parkinson. Hope Vale is no longer run as a mission by the church but has its own elected community council. The small town has a population of over 1000 people, and has medical facilities, school up to Grade 6, a supermarket and other essential services. There were quite a few dogs wandering in the streets, that we were careful to avoid while driving through the town.

Elim Beach is about 20kms further on from Hope Vale. We have booked in at Elim Beach for 3 days and wanted to get there early to take advantage of the first day.

Elim Beach Campground used to be called Eddie’s Camp, home of Eddie Deemal who passed away aged 95 about 18 months ago. The campground is now operated by his son, Ivan Deemal. We had seen a DVD of the Gall Boys from Kedron Caravans who had spent time with Eddie, and this inspired our visit.
We booked for a beach front site, but also knew that it was ‘first in best dressed’. The beach front sites were $20 per person per night, a total of $120 for 3 nights, but as we were to discover, it was so worth it.
We had the pick of 3 sites on the beach but chose the one with grass as we had been camping in dust for the past couple of weeks. What a fantastic site. Right on the beach, about 10 steps to the sand, full sun for our solar, and a view to die for. The main campground was grassy and quite shaded, and was $10 per person per night. We were glad we arrived early to choose our site on the beachfront (we chose site 1A).
There are cold showers and flushing toilets and a camp kitchen, but we are fully self-contained and arrived stocked with water and food. There are restrictions on bringing alcohol into the area so we only had about a dozen cans and some wine. No checks were done.
We have nice neighbors, a family originally from Victoria travelling full time on the road in a caravan on one side, and a young couple also travelling full time in a 4WD, roof top tent and annex set up on the other side.

We spent a bit of time getting to know our neighbors and enjoyed some nice chats, especially with young couple camping nearby, Jess and Mika. Jess is learning fire twirling and entertained us after dark with her skills. She had been using LED lights for twirling, but this was the first time she had actually used fire and it looked and sounded amazing. She said twirling was a real upper body workout, and she was tired after each session. It was a great spectacle on the beach at sunset. We were so lucky to witness it. Jess was very good and said she may think about busking at Mindil Markets in Darwin. We may meet up with them again as we may travel to Darwin before heading down south.
I was reminded of a younger self travelling around Australia in a Kombi in the 1980’s, although their set up is much more sophisticated that the old Kombi.Read more