But things were jolly enough in the garden of our hotel. We leaned out over the balcony and greeted the handsome, Spanish-looking woman who had welcomed us the night before. She was collecting coconuts that had fallen from her own palms in the storm, gathering them into a basket which she carried like a mulatto woman in a male fantasy. She waved back. Then went on collecting. We were interested in what she would do next because Ros had earlier tossed down a coconut that we’d been travelling with since Townsville and been unable to open. When the woman came to it she appeared baffled by the knife marks all over it, and the screwdriver gouges, and the bruises from where I’d tried to jam it in the door of the car. She turned it around in her hand and then saw the price sticker. She stared at it for a long time and then stared at the tree it had lain beneath. Then she disappeared. Five minutes later there was a knock on our door. She was carrying a plate and several slices of coconut. And smiling. ‘Like a little of this for breakfast?’ she asked.

We said yes, of course.

The plan was to spend some time – one whole day and a night would do – back on Green Island. Whatever else we could squeeze into our rapidly contracting itinerary, Ros was determined to have one last snorkel. She had made friends with many of those fish. She wanted to see them again. As this was not a suitable island day we made a booking for the next. Then we drove back to Mossman to stock up with custard apples, took a look around Port Douglas, where we found Diane Cilento’s restaurant closed but a frolicsome Bavarian coffee shop open and for sale, and turned up at Hartley’s Creek Zoo in good time to catch the famous crocodile attack show and otherwise enjoy ‘North Queensland’s unique wildlife in a lush tropical setting, alongside a real crocodile inhabitated creek and Australia’s only walk-in dingo enclosure’.

It was here, incidentally, that I received my first and only serious wound of the entire journey. I was bitten, just below the left knee, by a goose.