Buying Food in Cape York

You can buy some fresh food and frozen milk and bread in some road houses such as coen and small parcels of meat that are cryovaced.

Weipa has a large super market and other shops.

Lockhart river has a super market only smallish.

When at the top there are plenty of supplies and if they are low the boat will be in,in a couple of days.

Have a good one.

All the best
Eric

deserter
Plenty of fresh meat and veges available at Cooktown, Weipa, Seisia and Bamaga. Limited supplies at Coen. Can't comment on the smaller locations, sorry. But I don't think any of the roadhouses on the main road sell those items. The roadhouse at the Jardine River ferry didn't even have any ice creams a couple of weeks ago!

tg

My advice to you is to buy your meat and non perishables in somewhere like Cairns and just rely on the local communities for top ups IF AVAILABLE.

Yes you will find a supermarket at Weipa, Bamaga & Siesia but don't expect too much, and if they have what you want, the price may not be what you want.

We were up there in May June this year and made the decision to buy the bulk of our food in Cairns and just top up as necessary along the way.

An earlier post by me read: "A tip to anyone wanting to take cryovac meat with them and leaving from Cairns, be it The Cape or The Savannah Way or The Gulf, I can recommend "Raintrees Meats" Raintrees Shopping centre Manunda Cairns, ask for Rob Moorcroft. 07 40324636. They prepared all our meat for our recent trip up the Cape and we were more than impressed with the service and quality of the products supplied, the meat was always fresh, tender, well packed & top quality, I can confidently recommend Rob. They gave us tips on preserving and storing the meat and froze the lot ready for us to put in the fridge (within 1 full days notice)"

Now I hear you saying why freeze and cryovac?

A: freezing the meat and putting it in the bottom of your fridge, UNDER NEWSPAPER, will keep it in a semi frozen state that serves two purposes, one not to put a strain on your fridge with room temp meat and second it is still semi frozen weeks later and very fresh when needed.

Even fresh bread is not to be taken for granted up there. Bamaga has a Bakehouse next door to the supermarket but the bread from there must be consumed ASAP as the preservatives in city bread are not there (Thank God) but due to this the bread is stale in a day or so.

Any questions welcome, Colin.

do you really need cryovac?

tg

When we travelled the Cape in 99 we bought meat in Cooktown. It lasted us about 2 weeks.

Some of this meat was frozen and some cryovac. Endeavour Butchery supplied all the meat and the advice. Some stuff lends itself to cryovac and some, we were advised, does not.

We used a 3 way fridge back then which did not work on 12v. We set it to freeze over night and kept it closed during the day. All our meat was fresh and tasty when consumed.

Back then Weipa had a Woollies supermarket which was just the same as every other Woollies except that the bread was frozen. We were surprised at how reasonable the prices were. Fuel in Weipa back then was at Sydney prices.

We did manage to pick up frozen bread and milk at a couple of the road houses, Hahn River I think and Archer River. Good coffee at Archer River too, or maybe it was just that we had been a long time without it.

We did not have any problems with supplies but mechanics were thin on the ground.

Duncs

Personally I plan to live off fish! Seriously, when we were there for two months there were precious few day we could not have eaten fish. In fact when we were at Port Stewart we had way too much and that taught us to catch only that we could consume on the day - we ended up bringing back a fair bit of the frozen meat we left with.

Kind regards

Just something I need to know is if a sure cure fof seasickness is to sit under a tree does this mean I should take one when I go fishing?