We're sitting happily in our camp at the very top end, a crocodile-safe distance from the water, as insurance apparently lest a hungry monster arrive beside our van in the depth of the night armed with a tin opener.
Surely there'd be tastier morsels in tents I argue, and easier to get to as well, but the other of us has deaf ears when it comes to nocturnal safety and we have to be content with our twenty metre walk to the sand.
The legion of "superheroes" wearing $80.00 sunshirts proclaiming them to have "crossed the Jardine" (it's a ferry), or "made it to the Tip" are a little puzzling to us. Recently our National Broadcaster referred to the journey we had just completed in quite concerning terms:
"The "trip to the tip" is the ultimate pilgrimage for conquistador four-wheel drivers, "
It's a dirt ROAD for crying out loud, and I'll bet not one of them were without air-conditioning, or a frig full of cold beverages, a sound system (because you don't have radios anymore) with their playlists happily on shuffle, and often towing vans filled with all the luxuries of home, perhaps exactly like the conquistadors of old.
To be fair, we are at least five hundred kilometres from accessible telephone or internet services so the playlists can't be updated, which adds measurably to the challenge.
There are others too, who think the logical and sensible "bypass" route is for "chickens". They, for some reason set out on the most difficult of tracks, in some sort of competition with their mates to see who can unleash the greatest damage on their machines, the furthest distance from home carrying broken parts as some sort of manly souvenir of their feat.
The view is the same for all of us, whether conquistador or tourist, and either way it's worth the trip.
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