Townsville

“Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia”

–Charles Schultz

Sugar Cane to the right of me and Bananas to the left, Sugar Cane to the left and Bananas to the right. For a good few hours of driving and many more to come this would be my landscape.  Not boring but rather exotic and exciting to a Canadian boy. However, I would be haunted by the gastronomic effects of too many road side fruit stops. (Eating too many mangos, paw paws and rock melons).

I was pretty scared arriving in Townsville. It was the first large city I was to drive on the left side of the road in. It was the first time I  encountered the dreaded  ROUNDABOUT. One of the perils of traveling and driving alone is that you have no map reader in your passenger seat.  So it took me awhile to find the hostel.  It was around this time that I had a sudden realization that I was all alone in a foreign country. Having seen some pretty amazing things so far I was looking forward to a bit of the city life.

Townsville was only supposed to me a stopover for a trip to Magnetic Island, but it turned out to be far more interesting. The pictures here are sparse because of a few reasons. The first one being that I decided to relax the camera a bit and the second was of the great need to have a few ales. My hostel mates were a trio of young Germans from Cologne. We went out one night to the Mad Cow bar in downtown Townsville. I remember one of the Germans getting arrested and we had to go to the watch house and help bail him out of the jail. Oh, what a night. Oh…Yeah. I remember now…I was here to do the Koala Walk hike on Maggie or Magnetic Island