Take zac!

Today is ANZAC Day here in Australia, it's a bit like Rememberance Sunday back home except that here it's a proper holiday, everywhere is closed and the streets are dead. Luckily though we're back in Townsville, so there's pretty much no difference.

Boring name, boring town

So, Townsville. What a strange little place. Our Lonely Planet said the city has a population of 150,000, but I'll be damned if I knew where they were. The place was deserted. We parked on the edge of town and walked in, the only person we passed was a tramp throwing up in a doorway of an abandoned shopfront, proceeding to walk past us with bits of vomit dangling from his beard. He looked a little like Santa Claus would if the toy business dried up, and he was wearing a t-shirt that said 'Welcome To Townsville'. He wasn't really, I made that bit up, but he might as well have been. We reached the river that runs through the city and I parted from the girls because I wanted to check out the maritime museum. I strode in the baking sun for about 600 meters past lovely little restaurants with tables outside. Palm trees lined the street and there wasn't a soul to be seen. It reminded me a little of Barcelona and the nocturnal inhabitants there, but it was about 10am and I expected it to be busier. The museum itself was nice enough. It also incorporates a model building club so many of the displays were built by amateurs, and they looked it. Still, I applauded the effort and spent a happy hour there before heading into town to meet up with the girls. When I found them they told me the only people they'd seen had been vagrants. Every bench on the main street had one, apparently. The only one I'd seen had been Santa, so I shrugged and we pressed on. We went to the Museum of Tropical Queensland which was pretty good, I have to say. Large, air-conditioned, informative, clean, and above all devoid of other people. The gift shop staff outnumbered the patrons two to one. We had lunch on a little terrace overlooking the main road and the marina, and all we could here was the sound of silence. There wasn't a car on the roads. It was very eerie, to say the least.

After the museum we headed back up town and did a little shopping. I was looking for a new t-shirt but the only ones I could find had those inane slogans on them, things like a picture of a cockerel and the words 'My Cock'll Do'. You see them in souvenir shops everywhere and they always have big stacks of them, presumably because only an idiot would wear them. Hot, tired and bored, we headed for the cinema. We saw Disturbia which is dumb but fun. Go and see it and count the number of times you can see the boom mic. It's really quite astonishing, particularly at the beginning of the film. It's based on Hitchcock's Rear Window, which I hadn't seen, so to me it was just based on the episode of The Simpsons where Bart breaks his leg. Still, it was a pretty enjoyable film. Afterwards the girls went to see the new Mr. Bean movie, which I couldn't face without a few beers first, so I passed. I found an internet place that was still open and got chatting to a guy there about Townsville in general. I asked him about the vagrants and he shrugged and said that it was just one of those things. I shouldn't have bothered asking him though, he was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a cockerel and the words 'My Cock'll Do'.

My need for beer was becoming stronger so I went to the Great Northern Hotel where I noticed that my bottles of beer commemorated Australia Day 2007, something I hadn't seen on beer bottles since arriving here. That's because Australia Day was in January. Clearly, this wasn't the busiest of places. After about twenty minutes the bar staff outnumbered the customers two to one - there were two of them and one of me - and this was at 8pm! I asked the barman why it was so quiet and he shrugged and said "Just a Wednesday thing I guess. Should be good on Friday if you're going to be around, we've got a guy coming down who does some songs. Gets pretty packed. You should check it out if you're in town".
I feigned disappointment. "Och, we're heading north tomorrow" I said, and he looked pretty disappointed.

We spent the night back at the truck stop and headed back into town this morning to do some little jobs, and it's alot busier today. Must be a Wednesday thing after all. It's a nice place, vomiting vagrants aside, there's plenty to do and see but after a day it could get kind of boring. Oh, and better t-shirt shops wouldn't go amiss.

Rockhampton rocks

We cruised out of Bundaberg in high spirits - we had clean clothes and plenty more space in the car - things no longer fell out of the boot when you opened it. We knew we weren't going to make it all the way to Airlie Beach (it was about 500 miles away - like driving from London to Fife) but there were a couple of free camp areas about half way that looked a safe bet.

When we got back out on to the Bruce Highway, we drove through several hundred kilometers of more or less nothing. The scenery was nice but I have rarely seen such a long stretch of road with no diversions. No towns, no service stations, no giant billboards - nothing. And we were still on the coast! Goodness knows what the outback will be like. By the time we reached Rockhampton, a large town that straddles the Tropic of Capricorn, we were pretty hungry. Rockhampton is famous for its cows and its beef, so I suggested to the girls we get some steaks. Their eyes lit up. We filled up the car at a BP garage and I asked the attendant for directions to the Criterion Hotel, which our Lonely Planet had described as being a good place to eat. He was friendly and helpful, but made it sound like not following his directions precisely would end in disaster.
"You go down to the river and turn right, then drive to the first bridge". At this point he leaned in as if to emphasize his next instruction. "But don't you go under that bridge, you hear? Don't you go under it or you'll pass the hotel". I began to wonder if there was another, more sinister reason he didn't want me to go under the bridge, after all I didn't think my dinner plans meant that much to him. But I thanked him, paid for the petrol and we set off to find the hotel. (Incidentally, petrol here works out at about 49 pence a litre.)

The guidebook was right - the hotel was excellent. Rockhampton itself looked very nice, lots of wide streets and old fashioned buildings, the town center was unspoilt - faded buildings with chipped paint - but it was very nice. The hotel itself was grand and welcoming and the steaks were juicy and very filling. I had also intended to see just what lay on the other side of the bridge, but I forgot. We got back into the car and drove for another hour until we came across our campsite, a large patch of grass at the back of a hotel in a tiny village called Marlborough, about a mile off the highway.

The sun woke us early the next day and we emerged from our ovens to begin another day on the road. The stretch of road from Marlborough to the next large town, Mackay, was largely desolate, but did provide a few diversions - my favourite being a freight train pulling 87 trucks (I counted). It would be inaccurate to say that the wildlife here was more abundant, because wildlife is everywhere in Australia. Even when standing in your own bathroom it's very easy to imagine David Attenborough finding plenty of exciting things to whisper about. The wildlife in this part of Australia is just a bit more obvious, especially from a moving vehicle. We had to dodge kangaroos, tortoises and frogs, all of which seemed to prefer the baking tarmac to the long grasses from which they had emerged to meet their flattened fate. While negotiating our way through a large creep of tortoises - and I bet you didn't know 'creep' was the collective noun for tortoises - Jen was very close to pulling the car over and attempting to rescue them.

We rolled into Mackay for lunch and made our way to the nearest shopping center. It's not that we particularly wanted to spend an afternoon in a large shopping center on the last Saturday of the Easter holidays - I'd sooner have gone to an opera - but that shopping center foodcourts are among the cheapest places for budget conscious travellers such as ourselves to eat. After this refuelling stop we hit the road again before arriving in Airlie Beach in the middle of the afternoon.

Airlie Beach is a bit like a miniature version of Byron Bay, only minus the beaches and the hippies. It's small, and the high street is jam packed with backpackers hostels and tour operators - the popular Whitsunday Islands are just off the coast. There also seems to be a larger portion of 'trendier' holiday-makers here. English people in their early twenties who look like they usually spend their summers in Ibiza or Tenerife. Unfortunately, when we arrived, there wasn't a single bed to be found in the hostels, and the campsites were way out of town. Eventually we had a mini-meeting and decided to treat ourselves to three nights in a motel - and a very well appointed one at that. After a month of camping it's wonderful having a fridge, a television, air conditioning and a shower that isn't coin operated. We've spent the last two days relaxing in our room watching movies and trash TV and eating junk food. It's been great. It'll be difficult camping again after this but I'm sure we'll survive. Tomorrow we'll begin our trek towards Cairns which is more or less as far north as you can go on the east coast, before coming back down to Townsville and heading into the outback. Cairns looks interesting, but I'll let you know about it when I get there.

Sun, sand, sea, and a pain in the ass

Our three day 'holiday within a holiday' to Fraser Island finished yesterday, and I don't want to overstate it, but it is one of the most singularly beautiful places I've ever seen. It's the world's largest sand island, measuring about 120 kilometers from end to end, and about 1600 square kilometers by area. To put it in perspective, this is an island larger than Fife (1300 sq km) and it's made entirely of sand.

Our tour was booked through our hostel on the mainland, and it was a self drive tour where essentially we were camping and exploring the island with six strangers. There was no tour guide but we were given an outline of an itinerary that would enable us to see the best bits of the island. Fraser Island has no tarmac roads, so access is only accessible by four-wheel drive. The jeep that we hired (a Toyota Rustbucket, or similar) looked and sounded as if it was held together by rust and sand, but it held out for all three days, much to our surprise.

Usually in these 'forced group' situations there is a worry that you won't gel with your new travelling companions, but luckily everyone was friendly, aside from an English doctor called Carla. She was with her friend, also a doctor, called Amelia who was chatty and friendly but Carla was a thouroughly joyless character. She seemed to be more concerned with how long we spent at each place than actually enjoying herself, and didn't seem overly enamoured by camping on an island with a group of strangers.

Our first stop was at the campsite to pitch our tents and grab a spot of lunch before heading to Lake Birrabeen, one of the islands 200 plus lakes. The lakes are special because they are freshwater lakes, created by rainwater gathering on an impermeable layer of sand and leaves. When we emerged from the woods to the lakeside we were greeted by a picture postcard landscape. A clear blue lake surrounded by trees and pure white sand - it was gorgeous. We spent ages floundering around in the water until it was time to visit Lake McKenzie, which was no less beautiful but it started to rain so we didn't hang around there for too long. That night there was no cessation of the downpour so we were forced to eat our tea in the van in close to pitch darkness. Jen, Claire and I, and a few of the others were fine with this but I think it was too much for some and there were several grumpy faces in the morning. Luckily on our second day we were treated to a blazing sun and a cloudless sky as we jumped in the jeep and headed along the Eastern beach of the island. We stopped off first at Indian Head, a large volcanic rock formation a few hundred feet high which is normally a perfect vantage point for seeing whales and sharks, but we were informed that it was too windy for the creatures to venture towards the shore. On our way back down we stopped at the wreck of the S.S. Maheno, a former passenger ship that was beached there in 1935, as a storm stopped it from becoming scrap metal in Japan. Three stories of it are completely buried under sand, but it's still an amazing site, huge hunks of rotting metal poking out from the sand make for some interesting photographs if nothing else. I was also pleasantly surprised that the Maheno and I shared a country of birth - she was built in Glasgow in 1905. That night the rain stayed away and Jen treated us all to spaghetti bolognese, and the dampened spirits of the previous night were completely lifted.

On our last day we only had time to visit Lake Wabby, a smaller, grubbier looking lake notable for the fact that it is surrounded on three sides by rainforest, and on one side by a massive sand dune, which is encroaching on the lake at a rate of about three meters a year. We spent an hour or so in this unique location before heading back down the beach and to the mainland, our Fraser Island adventure over. Last night we drove a few hundred kilometers north to the town of Bundaberg, and I was amazed to learn that after two and a bit hours in the car, we were still only parallel with Fraser Islands' northern tip. Like I said, it's pretty big.

Anyway, I must go - I'm almost out of time and we've got a long drive ahead of us today. Our next stop is a place called Airlie Beach, which ironically is one of the few places that doesn't have a beach. I just know that Fraser Island will take a long time to leave me. I don't mean that in a metaphorical way - I mean it in a literal sense. There's sand everywhere, in my hair, in my bed and in my clothes. Hopefully the confusingly-named Airlie Beach will provide some respite!

Coffs Harbour

After we left Port Macquarie on the 23rd, we pulled into a little town called Coffs Harbour which was only notable for two things. Firstly, it is home to the Big Banana, one of Australia's many 'big things', and secondly, our campsite not only contained a miniature Dutch village, but also a fully operative clog makers workshop. I tried to find out exactly why this little corner of the Netherlands was here, but nobody that worked at the caravan park seemed to know why.

Two days later we ended up in Byron Bay, which essentially looks like every other coastal town in New South Wales but it is a mecca for the 'alternative' traveller. Hippies on every bench and VW campers round every corner, it has a fabulous laid-back feel with everything you need. We liked it so much we were actually there for eight days. We stayed at a backpackers lodge called the Arts Factory, and pitched our tents in their jungle hideaway. It was a bit like being at a festival with the tents crammed together, and just incase we'd forgotton what a festival was really like it poured with rain for the first half of our stay. So Byron Bay was where Jen celebrated her 22nd birthday and where we took to the skies and spent a day hang-gliding. It was a fantastic week and there's plenty more stories to share, but they can wait for another day.

We rolled out of Byron and ended up across the border in Queensland - Australia only has six states so crossing into a new one is quite an event - and headed for Brisbane. None of us had anything we wanted to do in Brisbane so we headed for North Stradbroke Island, the Island my friend Cat Emberton lived on during her first stint out here. We only stayed one night, it was quite pricy to take the car across on the ferry, and besides we had three days of Gold Coast theme parks to look forward to. I was however quite surprised when I tried to find the cafe Cat worked at, I asked a girl in a backpackers where it was.
"Why, do you know someone there?" She asked.
"My friend used to work there, I just wanted to have a look" I replied.
"Was she Scottish?"
"Yeah..."
"Cat?" Small island, I thought.

The first theme park we went to was 'White Water World' and although it was small, the rides were excellent. Its parent park, Dreamworld was our next stop and was slightly disappointing, but by the time we made it to Warner Bros. Movie World, we'd all but forgotton Dreamworld and it's rather unimaginatively named rides. ("The Big Drop", "The Log Ride", "The Rapids" etc.) Movie World was fantastic. It's got one of the best roller coasters I've ever been on (Superman Escape) and had very convincing actors walking around dressed as all my favourite superheroes. It was a great day out and fun pretending I was twelve years old again.

The next day we drove a bit further north and visited Australia Zoo, famous for being the one owned and operated by the late, great Crocodile Hunter himself, Steve Irwin. We were slightly underwhelmed by it, we'd probably hyped it up too much in our heads but having said that it's still the best zoo I've ever been to, you can practically feel Stevo's presence everywhere you go.

Tired and hungry, we pulled into a truck stop and snuck into the truckie's showers - after four nights of sleeping by the roadside we were starting to smell a bit - and then rolled into Rainbow Beach, a small and rather unimpressive if friendly community, and it is here that I'm writing all this. We are only here because tomorrow we're going on a tour of Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world. It's about 123 kilometers long, or about 75 miles, which is quite hard to imagine. I only hope the weather clears up, we've been here for two days and seen nothing but torrential rain.