Townsville Tales

Picture - Beach area in Townsville (no, thats not Ayers Rock in the background)

After Charters Towers, we took the Gregory Development north rather than the main road west to Townsville. People we had met told us of a great campsite (free of course) at Fletchers Creek. Well, good it was and there were quite a number of caravans and mobile homes parked up there. At this place you are allowed to stay one week and there are toilet facilities and showers, maintained by the Charters Towers Shire Council. What a lovely place it is by the creek. Real water… this was the first campsite like this since I don’t know when. Anyway, we stayed three nights there and blobbed out. After that we drove on the Development Road towards Townsville but that road is traveled by road trains carrying copper ore and also cattle. Every so often there is a checkpoint where you need to call up on your CB just to let the road trains know where you are because in many places the road is a central strip of bitumen with the usual red gravel on either side. The road trains here were the standard 50 meter length with three trailers. In some places the ore trains are eight trailers in length and they wiggle about so you have to take real care. It was also raining lightly so it was a case of having to be careful and to pull right off the road when a road train came along. We were talking to them on our CB and so we didn’t have much trouble. After about 50 km we turned off on the Townsville road and that was a really good road with wide lanes. We made Townsville in good time and parked up with other campers at the BP service station at the south of the city where the road trains assemble. It’s a free site in our ‘Camps 4’ book with all facilities. Yes, it is a bit noisy with the trucks moving around but it is a separate area for caravans and campers, and you get used to the truck noise anyway.

The weather was OK during the day but it poured down at night. We drove around Townsville – it’s a pretty city on the shoreline and stopped at the foreshore by the rock pools. Maureen went for a long walk along the beach area and then we went in to the Fletcher Mall to check out the shops. This is tropical Queensland and when it rains, it rains. On the road north, it was quite wet. Apparently, Tully gets 300 rainy days a year and is comparable with Milford Sound in NZ on the amount of fall. In fact, the low hanging mist round the hills and the bush looked just like our West Coast and at this time of the year the temperature is not too dissimilar. So on this coast, we stopped overnight at Balgal Beach where we saw our first signage about the danger of Crocodiles. Welcome to the far North!!! And we also stopped at two roadside rest areas. Maureen is getting into the freedom camping in a big way now as we haven’t stopped at a caravan park since Mt Isa. It’s good that we are totally independent with our solar panel for power and our own facilities though in most cases, the roadside rest areas have toilets and some have showers.

We drove into Cairns for a look around and made up the hill, or should I say the Great Dividing Range, to Mareeba. It’s quite a climb for our old bus but it is beautiful scenery. In parts, the gondola that goes from Cairns up to Karunda crosses above the road. It’s a tourist area up on the tablelands with a special tourist train that runs up to Mareeba and on to Karunda. We had to drive on to Atherton after our weekend at Mareeba to have our rear springs redone. After getting the front ones done in Melbourne, we have been dragging our tail a bit in appearance and have found the fridge not working sometimes because of the van being off level.

Our yachting friends Kathy and Pete have arrived in Cairns so we are now off to meet up with them. They are here for about three weeks after sailing across from Vanuatu and so we could well be here in Cairns for a short while. After that, we will be looking forward to meeting up with Al and Katherine and baby Alex, so it’s going to be a busy month.