Loyalty Beach Camp

 

Making our way back to Bamaga Road, we traveled the 10k to Injinoo, a small community on the coast. Another 7k east we rolled into Bamaga, the main community on the Tip. While there we topped up our grocery supplies from the well stocked supermarket, then topped up our fuel. Seisia, the port where the ferry to Thursday Island leaves from is about 10k north. It is also where the barge that brings all the supplies and goods to the communities docks. We went to have a look.

Some 4k north of Seisia is Loyalty Beach, it has a paid camp ground with a resturant and bar. Not being our type of camp, and knowing it would be packed we didn’t call in, but continued up the road a few k and found some tracks leading to the coast. Following one of the tracks we emerged at the beach. There were several lean to shelters and bits and pieces scattered up and down the foreshore. Obviously locals part time camps. No one was about, so we claimed a shady spot with a table under a tree.

The setting sun threw beams of light through the low hanging clouds, silhouetting the barge as it passed by, heading back around the tip after unloading at Seisia. Sea birds swooped and flew past as did a helicopter, taking people to hover over the tip and skirt the coastline.

In the morning, after breakfast, an old indigenous man was wandering up the beach, casting out a lure. He came in line with our camp and Din, as she does, went down and started to chat. I packed up camp and joined them.

He was fishing for squid, up the beach a little way was his camp. His wife was at home looking after the grand kids. “Too many of them.” he said, so he told her he was going out to the camp to fish. His right arm hung loose by his side, paralysed, from an old football injury, but the hand worked fine, “I get by”, he said. We had a good chat and he told us he was originally from Bardoo Island, a little way off the tip, and said this was not a good camp on the weekend for us as sometimes the locals come out and drink too much. “Next time you are this way, you come to my camp and stay, you be OK there”, he said. We thanked him very much and said we would.