Cape Tribulation: Killer Creek

Before breakfast, on a walk along the beach towards the cape, we spotted a water snake in the mangroves and a monitor lizard on the beach. It took me 38 years to see an adder in the UK, but here it’s difficult to avoid dangerous and deadly creatures.

On a local tip, we took the dirt track, the beginning of the old road to Cooktown and Cape York, to Emmagen Creek, which had been described as a beautiful blue swimming hole off the beaten track. We parked beside the creak with a big yellow croc warning and took a path through the rainforest. The path was not well trodden. After about 15 minutes Digs said if we were quiet we might see something. We all hushed up and kept our rustling to a minimum. Then Raz saw something. “Snake!” he said as a loudish whisper. Digs was first and hadn’t seen it, which meant he had probably walked over it. I saw it slide off diagonally into the bush; a long slim black one. 

A couple of minutes later we ended up, freaked out, at the creek. The banks were full of holes – croc holes – and it was spooky. We saw a couple of impossibly blue and large butterflies dancing together, as if in warning, over the creak. We speed-ate a family-sized packet of crisps, then got the hell of there, making as much of a racket as we could. I sang the Batman theme tune on a loop and some of the kids growled like bears.

We found out later that our snake could have either been a King Brown – highly dangerous, or a Red Bellied Black Snake, another of Queensland's most deadly serpents, but fortunately not an actively agressive one like the Taipans which chase the sugar cane workers in the fields.             

Cape Trib: Bear and Magi sat on the beach.

Queenslander House

Cape Trib

Emmergen (Killer) Creek