Trials and (Cape) Tribulations
Trip Start
Sep 12, 2005
1
59
108
Trip End
Aug 15, 2006
Cairns,
Australia
Saturday, April 8, 2006
-Hello
-Hello, You sell car? said a foreign voice
-Yes, are you interested?
-When do you leave?
-6 days
-I phone you back day before you leave bye
-Bye
We had a few more calls along the same line
Cape Trib. Where the rainforest meets the reef
. Basically, if we couldn't sell it to some other sucker one of these guys would call us back in our last desperate hour of need and offer us a pathetic amount for our beloved Telstar. We decided to hang the boots up for a day. We started off early in our tred machine to Cape Tribulation a 2 hour drive north of Cairns. Advertised as "the point where the rainforest meets the sea" it had a reputation as a point of natural beauty.
It rained heavily for most of the drive but eased off as we reached our destination. We thought it would be nice to go for a stroll through the rainforest to the beach for a bit of lunch. After grinding through 2 raw pot noodles we sensed another heavy burst of rain so we made for the car. As we made our way back to the car we came to a little bridge which was occupied by two lace monitors. The larger of the two, about 5 feet long was following the smaller across the bridge. "Don't worry Mairead they are harmless" said an edgy Conor. "That's obviously the infant with the mother carefully watching its progress across the bridge." After a minute or 2 Mairead asked what the mother was doing now, as the larger monitor gently mounted itself on top of the smaller one! It turned out that the infant was the mother and the "mother" was in fact the "big daddy!" after a 2 minute public display the happy couple made off up a tree and we dandered back to the car laughing
It one of those fotos you just have to take.....
!We went for a few more walks between showers keeping our eyes peeled for crocs before heading back to Cairns. When we got back we thought we'd have a check up on our progress on the car notice boards only to find that all of the posters had been removed as there was a 3 day limit. We spent the rest of the night replacing our notices. the next day as we got some clean clothes from the car something strange happened. A young Canadian guy approached the car and actually showed some genuine interest in it! Could this be the sucker we were looking for? Had he not looked at the other 40 something cars on the notice boards at half the price?
Seemingly not as he phoned us back that night asking if he could have a test drive. We made a conscious decision there and then that this was our fish and we weren't letting him go. The phone calls continued over the next few days and his gentle "Canadian Style" haggling was more than welcome as we had inflated our price by a few hundred more than we had bought it for. The deal was almost done until a hitch arose...The Canadian and his girlfriend were living in Cairns which meant the $500 registration from Victoria that we had bought with the car was worthless... we were loosing him. His case was genuine we were stuck, we had no other offers
Mother and child..before they showed us otherwise!
. We dropped our asking price a few hundred on the grounds that "we really liked him" and wanted him to take our beloved car! He lapped it up and gave us the money the next day. We accepted $400 less than we paid for it, but we soon realised things could have been much worse as we walked past the backpackers car yard on the way home only to see a young German sob uncontrollably as she watched her $4,000 car drive off with a crowd of laughing Israeli lads. They had given her $500 for it as she was desperate and had to leave the next day. Thanks to Canadian Dave we had a lovely steak dinner that night!
After dinner we booked ourselves on a trip to the Great Barrier Reef which left the next morning.
