Cooktown Hotels

Cooktown is in Cook Shire in tropical north Queensland. In 1770, Captain James Cook spent 48 days here on the banks of the Endeavour River repairing his ship Endeavour, after it ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. A century later, in 1873, it became the port for the Palmer River Goldfields. Today it is billed as the gateway to the wilderness. It offers Mountains, Outback terrain, as well as some of the top scuba diving around. The springboard to the untamed Cape York Peninsula, Queensland's sleepiest port town sits at the mouth of the croc-infested Endeavour River. The townsfolk who plough Cooktown's main thoroughfare, Charlotte St, in dusty 4WDs with ‘easy does it' bumper stickers but are not afraid of hard work, and equally not shy of a ‘smoko' – say from ­October to June. Things boomed quickly back in the late 1880s transforming the hamlet into a thriving hub of 4000 (twice the current population). Cooktown is now enjoying something of a resurgence courtesy of the Cooktown Development Rd getting sealed in March 2006, making it accessible in the Wet – good news for game fishers from San Francisco to Tokyo who rent ‘millionaire's fleet' boats in the hope of snaring a legendary black marlin offshore. Apart from top-notch fishing and reef access, this small town with a big heart offers personalised tours, wetlands ripe for bird-watching and long, lonely beaches.