Day 421 | Lakeland Caravan Park: hills, wind and someone's burning off

54 km | zzOz total: 12,561 km

Some days have a different course from what you might initially imagine.

At the 3 km mark today, riding 16 minutes, I went past a sign pointing at Split Rock. After tootling a bit past I turned back and went on the walk, it’s a major Aboriginal rock art site, apparently. Most things marked in red on the local Hema maps are worth a short detour.

It was just 10 or 15 minutes up to two substantial galleries, the first with a splendid array of wildlife, a turtle, crocs, echidna maybe, roo, human figures, etc, and the second with a few Tall Spirits, of the genial kind.

I started talking with Dave, another early riser, who’d come from Cooktown and had a guide book that detailed a 4 km circuit to lookouts and further gallerias, just past that new looking No Unauthorised Access sign.

What sign? Probably for a different track we surmised.

We decided to wander around anyway, the book said nothing about restrictions, chatting on, spectacular lookouts in various directions, and then the biggest surprise a string of galleries, the biggest series I’ve come across in my travels, with a huge variety of images, animals, more crocs, turtles, brush turkeys, etc, spirits, plenty of hand outlines, overall there were hundreds of images.

The hands are common to many sites I’ve seen, the faint trace of humans from another age, some many thousands of years old.

You fit your hand over the top and let your mind wonder about what life was once like.