Townsville......Really?!

It was a relatively peaceful journey from Cairns to Townsville in all honesty. Only a couple of people had gone to the toilet and it remained unnoticeable on the smell scale. We arrived at Townsville Ferry port at half 5 in the morning, collected our bags from the luggage hold of the coach and got comfy on the wooden bench outside the port. It wasn’t a big bustling industrial port, more of a small passenger ferry terminal to take people across the water to Magnetic Island. The wooden bench wasn’t entirely comfortable and as I knew we needed to hunker down and get some more kip I decided to unroll my jogging bottoms leaving a small roll in the waist are so that I had a comfortable spine and a little pillow. But soon after a man came out with a big hose and told us all to go inside as he was going to be washing the pavements. Fine by us! Sadly there were no benches to stretch out on, only small plastic chairs. The jogging bottoms came in very useful again, this time as a cushion to stop my @rse from going numb. Such a versatile garment, I knew I was right not to bin them at the end of New Zealand like I did the big “Maori jumper”.

I awoke (for the last time, as I had had to rearrange myself intermittently throughout the morning) at 9, just as James was coming back from one of his morning wanders. Longer than normal though, and this is because he had managed to find the hostel and speak to them about us checking in early. When we arrived there our gracious (and French, we think) hostess welcomed us enthusiastically and got us booked in right away. Now this was more like it! We checked into our clean (good for a change) room with two single beds and a small fridge and sink. Pretty basic, but just what we needed.

Our Room

We settled in and checked through a few things, such as what to do in Townsville. You might be thinking at this point, “why the heck have you gone to Townsville??” and the reason is to break up the BIG trip down to Brisbane and to potentially visit Magnetic Island. This place had been recommended to us from Jeff the Greyhound guy in Cairns. You remember…the guy with one blue and one brown eye. So we hit the town in the afternoon to wander the streets, and there was precious much to see really. We went straight to The Strand, which is the affluent waterfront area with the beaches and restaurants. It felt great to be on a hot sunny beach again and walk through the waves as they lapped onto shore. There were two other places to see, but they both had extortionate admission fees so we decided that we would take the ferry to Magnetic Island the next day and keep this one a reasonably quiet one.

The Strand

We grabbed some dinner (from Woolworths) and some booze (generic wine shoppe) and got back to the hostel for a chilled evening. We noticed that booze here seemed to be pricier than Cairns, but maybe we had just found a good local shop in Cairns and we were back to “normal” prices again. But $7 for the wine I bought wasn’t a bad price, considering that it was the cheapest one in the shop and was actually very drinkable.