Townsville

Now in Townsville, some 400 km south of where I was 7 hours ago. They put us up in university dorms, quite nice. Will learn details tomorrow...
Almost ran out of gas on the way down - the bus driver said he went 150 km on empty, and could feel the engine almost giving out on the hills. But we're here! More fun times await.

En route

Left port Douglas half an hour ago. Going through cairns (expected to hit as category 4) to townsville (expected to hit as category 2). About 400 km drive, it's 7:20 pm, and "Highway to Hell" is playing on the radio. Wooot, this is the most fun I've had in ages. :)

CYCLONE!

It's 5:05 pm - and I was just told we are being evacuated to Townsville, normally a 6 hour drive but it will probably take 12 with traffic. Gotta go pack! Whoooo, adventure! :)

Cairns?

The flight to Cairns was uneventful. A LOT of Asian people on the plane - it became apparent during boarding that they have no concept of personal space whatsoever! Amazing how quickly one can feel claustrophobic when everyone is right on top of you.
Cairns itself is really low-key. The whole Cairns region is about 150 000 people, so Cairns itself is not that big. The main industry is tourism, and this is their slow season (the hostel said they were at maybe 30% of capacity). I'm disappointed to say that beach bunnies are definitely not in season. However, I'm primarily here to chill and learn to dive. Probably be another week at least before I go diving. There is a big cyclone in the offing, expected to make landfall tomorrow night. More on that later, when there is more.
I'm currently in Port Douglas, mostly because there is a beach and they provide a shuttle transfer from Cairns to Port Douglas. The water is bathtub warm, almost too warm for serious swimming but great. The beach seems to go on forever but you can only go swimming at one spot, within the jellyfish nets. Apparently the box jellyfish migrate here this time of year and are very unpleasant to the touch... Today the beach is already closed due to the impending cyclone.
Probably no exciting adventures until another week or more, have to do some work and figure the diving thing out.

Lookout

Walked up to the "Lookout" yesterday, a high spot in the hills around Apollo Bay. Here are some views of the town...
Probably no posts for a few days - planning to fly to Cairns on the 28th, so I have to do some planning and work.

Rain and Fog

The last couple of days have been rainy and quite foggy. I went through 2 rather large books, also tried surfing again today with a bit of better luck. No other exciting adventures at the moment, but I am trying to decide where to go from here. Decisions, decisions...

Rainforest Walk

This morning I hitched a ride with some fellow travelers. A lovely couple from Vancouver whom I had already met at the Metro YHA during my last day in Melbourne. We drove about an hour inland to a little patch of rainforest. The area had been farmed/logged before but has regrown quite nicely. They have a nice long canopy walk set up - a series of towers connected by walkways going up into the canopy and back down again. The highest spot is 47 meters, which at this time is not quite as high as the tallest trees. The trees themselves are only about half as high as they will get - they grow to over 100 meters tall.
The walkway is set up on "towers" which are basically steel tubes (maybe 1 to 2 feet in diameter), which are held by guy wires. Design load is 400 kg per square meter - that made me feel safer, especially considering the thing moves a fair bit when you are on it. The tallest point is a bigger tower with a spiral staircase going up to a viewing platform. There is also a spot where they have a section of walkway which is just sticking out and hanging freely in the air (held by cables).
We did not see any animals on the walk itself, but we did catch a glimpse of a wallaby by the side of the road. Alive, too. The trees themselves are amazing. They are very tall and slim and quite straight. The outer bark tends to come of in long thin pieces, so the actual tree is smooth with these fronds hanging from it. One of them had an ant highway going up the side of it. Even though cars drive on the left and people walk on the left on sidewalks, ants walk on the right... I wonder how many ants were on that one tree - it was a steady line several ants wide up and down the whole tree - a track a good inch or so wide full of ants for the whole length of the thing, so 50 meters times maybe 2-3 centimeters. That's a lot of ants.
I spent the afternoon on the beach. It was nice and sunny today, not like the past few days which were cloudy and cooler. Also found a fish market so maybe tomorrow I will cook some fish for supper.
Time to go do some work!

Finally - Pictures! Note they are clickable if you want to see a bigger version.
A cool machine I saw in Apollo Bay - the company makes sea-do's

Here one can really see how incredibly tall and thin the trees are, with no branches except right near the top.

 The top of this spiral tower is about 47 meters up.

 A view of the intermediate levels of foliage:

 The little specks are ants... a whole ant trail on the right part of the tree (crappy camera wouldn't focus any better than that)

 The ferns way at the bottom are taller than me:

 A view of the walkway from the bottom, showing the "towers" the thing is standing on.

 This fellow was swimming in the harbour, right by the boats. Over half a meter across I'd guess.