Judy & Brian Tour Oz

 Townsville Qld August 7th 2023 We came down to Townsville, only a 50km run from Rollingstone, for our week-long stay, which is a bit of a novelty for us. This is day 3 and we haven't got bored yet. Mind you, it's a 20km drive into town and to the Strand, which is pretty well the main attraction really.  Just wandering around really, I took a couple of snaps for posterity: Main Street, Townsville Qld The Grand Chancellor Hotel, aka The Sugar Shaker. Townsville Qld Everyone waa just hanging around, so we did the same. Townsville Qld The marina seems much larger than last time we were here.  Townsville Qld Our van park is in one of the northern-most suburbs of Townsville, a place called Deeragun. When we first came here in 2017 the van park was just nestled off the side of the Bruce Highway at a nondescript crossroad. At this point the highway runs next to the railway line. There were two trains a day, one up to Cairns and one back. Over the years, they started to do r...

We started out today with a visit to the markets at Mossman. A pretty sad affair I’m afraid to report, so we didn’t stay long and headed off to the Daintree. It’s been ten years since we were here last so we expected some changes: Daintree village itself seems pretty much the same, as did the vehicular ferry across the river. We elected not to do the river cruise, they are just too focussed on finding crocodiles and we are a bit over them, to tell the truth. Next stop was the Discovery Centre and we enjoyed our second visit, maybe even appreciated the rainforest more this time round. It doesn’t seem to have changed much, but it’s a good attraction and worth the effort and the price. We had a sandwich here and while eating lunch, Judy finally found a real live piece of fauna, a small turtle in the creek below our lunchtime perch. We called into Cow Bay for a look at the beach and then made our way up to Cape Tribulation, which neither of us could remember much about, except...