I liked the camp site at Basis Hole so I made a slow start, enjoyed the early sun shine and left around nine o’clock. The track to the Peninsula Development Road turned out to be a good dirt road. I stopped at Musgrave roadhouse to fill up on fuel, assuming that fuel prices go up when I get further north. The Development Road is an excellent dirt road with many stretches of bitumen. It is also fairly busy with holyday traffic. That really shows at the road houses: many vehicles parked there.
I stopped at Coen, named after the Dutch J.P. Coen, did some shopping for food at the general store and visited the local museum, a replica of the old telegraph station. It is a really small exhibition, with a substantial number of newspaper articles to illustrate the history of this area.
I left Coen and stopped at the quarantine station some 20 km further north, where all south bound traffic is checked on pests and diseases. Australia tries very hard to keep new pests en diseases out of the continent. AT this place I used the free Internet to check my mail, probably provided as a service when there is a row of vehicles waiting for inspection.
The next place to stop was Archer Roadhouse. I planned to camp here for the night but the camp site was chocker full, so I first tried to find a bush camp on the bank of the Archer river. That did not satisfy me, so I continued north and found a good bush camp along the track to the Cape York Quarry, not far north from Archer Roadhouse.
