Townsville

The rainy season

January 27, 2018

We both watch international darts matches on tv, so when we saw a few favourite players were coming to Queensland we grabbed tickets for the Townsville leg. It's an easy 6 hour drive to Townsville via Charters Towers (which we'd never visited before. We can thoroughly recommend the chunky beef pies at Peppers Cafe now though!). The landscape was incredibly dry and dead one kilometer, and lush the next as we passed over the climatic boundary. Really fascinating to see.

The two nights of darts were really fun. There were lots of people dressed up and larking about. We wrote (what we thought were) witty signs to hold up for the cameras - we were filmed so we'll be watching when the games are shown on tv in a few months to see if we made the cut. Anthony shook the hand of his favourite player (Englishman Phil Taylor). It was certainly an experience!

It was raining every day (a real contrast to home where it's unseasonably bone dry) which limited our explorations on foot but we still did the tourist spots like Castle Rock and Jezzine Barracks. On Australia Day we headed north and found a pretty little set of cascades at Little Crystal Creek. It was crawling with families having picnics so I grabbed a photo on my IR camera before we kept heading up the steep and windy mountain road to Paluma village where we had a lovely lunch in the cool mist (which was sometimes very heavy mist aka rain).

The trip was lots of fun and we'll have to do it again sometime!