It’s just a few short weeks now before we start our 2016 Cape York Adventure. It’s about bloody time; we first made a pact with our good friends Daryl and Tracey back in 2014 that, come whatever, we would conquer the northernmost tip of Australia in June this year.

Cape York is the dream trip for any 4×4 driver and camping enthusiast here in Oz. If you look at a map, the Cape York peninsula is the pointy end of the right side tip of Queensland. It’s around 1000 kilometres to The Top, as it’s know, from Cairns.

These days, the main road is well maintained and quite an easy drive but it would still take three days or more to get there if you just stuck to Development Road. In the Cape, driving time is not determined by distance here but road quality and this can change quite quickly depending on the weather.

As we will be deviating from the main road for much of the adventure, we have allowed four weeks for the trip. This may seem excessive, particularly for our readers in the UK and Europe, but let’s put things into perspective: Cape York covers an area of 140,000 square kilometres and has a population of around 18,000. In comparison, England covers an area of 130,000 square kilometres and has a population of more than 53 million.

In other words, you Brits have 2.45 square metres each and up in The Cape each person has 8 square kilometres to get lost in!

So as you can see, it is a vast area of potential adventure! I guess you could spend a lifetime exploring there if you felt inclined to do so. And we’ve spoken to people who have visited up to 32 times.

That far north there is no winter, spring, summer or autumn, just The Wet and The Dry season. And in The Wet it’s really wet, roads are closed and rivers are bursting their banks. The dry season is from May to November, so we’re cutting it close to the beginning of the season meaning there could still be some interesting soggy bits along the way.

We are in full swing of planning and getting our stuff together. The first big issue is that we are now living in Vanuatu, which is great, but a long way from being in Cairns for the beginning of June. That wasn’t going to stop us though; we’ve been talking about this for two years!

I’m heading home a couple of weeks early to prepare the car and trailer in Brisbane then drive up to Cairns to meet Joey and the kids. I’ve also allowed a bit of extra time to clean, fix and pack every thing away after we return to Brisbane.

It’s hard to believe but it’s finally happening… We are going to push the 4×4 and camping gear to the extremes and explore some of the most historic and talked about tracks in Australia. The Ashmore family is preparing heavily, excited, intrigued, and just a little scared!