My guide book describes Mount Isa as "a smog covered mining town with very little to offer, where many backpackers simply give up and catch a bus!". Nevertheless, the roads have now opened up this far and I'd exhausted all the possibilities of Townsville so I thought it was time to press on. Mount Isa may be over eight hundred kilometres and a whole night on a coach away from Townsville, but it's also eight hundred kilometres closer to Darwin and I wanted to get as far as possible before anybody changed their minds and closed the roads again. In Australia, travelling in the wet season means taking every opportunity you can. I was joined on my journey west by Antoinette, a young woman with a penchant for photography who was on her way home to Mount Isa and virtually threw herself on me at the bus station in Townsville upon spotting the new camera hanging by my side. She knew far too much on the subject as far as I was concerned, so I found myself nodding and saying "of course" in as convincing a voice as I could manage while she threw phrases such as 3D Matrix Metering at me and hoping that my obvious knowledge on the subject would make me look suitably eligible. Finally, Antoinette just took the camera from me and spent the vast majority of the trip thumbing through the manual, twiddling buttons and going "ooh" whenever the camera responded with a satisfactory whirr. At one point, just as I was nodding off to sleep, Antoinette burst into laughter and I awoke to find her stabbing a finger at a big red warning box at the top of page 52 of the manual: SINCE THE PRINT TYPE LEVER IS LOCATED NEXT TO THE VIEWFINDER, BE CAREFUL NOT TO POKE YOURSELF IN THE EYE WITH YOUR FINGER WHEN ADJUSTING IT. After everything I've read about the place, Mount Isa has come as a pleasant surprise to me. I had been expecting a bustling mining town covered in noxious fumes, twin smokestacks billowing out ozone depleting chemicals in every direction. I had even expected to need an interpreter in order to talk to anybody, because my guide book describes the place as boasting an "international mining community speaking hundreds of languages". In fact, to be totally honest, I had been expecting to want to slit my throat on arrival. It just goes to prove you shouldn't believe everything you read. The sun was shining brightly when we arrived suddenly at the small but cosy out of town Greyhound Bus Terminal. Mount Isa is one of the few major stopping off points on the route to Darwin, and its buildings spring up out of the desert without warning after hundreds of miles of barren desert track. Stay on the road for another five minutes, though, and you've passed straight through and are quickly swallowed up by the desert once more - this is pretty much the norm in outback Australia. In terms of area, locals boast that Mount Isa is the biggest city in the world, but this really is the sort of statistic you would only expect to be given by an Australian. Most of us would define a city as being a large collection of buildings and perhaps some outlying suburbs, but a few miles down the road you'll arrive in the next town or city - in Australia, it can't possibly work like this. The main problem is that there may well be several hundred miles of desert between one settlement and the next, so town councils have to decide where the borders between districts are to be placed and they can happily lay claim to a pretty huge area, claiming small towns hundreds of miles away which previously thought they were pretty much self-contained as a suburb of their city. The city council of Mount Isa, therefore, makes the claim - absurd by the standards of anybody outside Australia - that the city of Mount Isa covers an area of around forty-three thousand square kilometres, twenty-eight times the size of London. The fact that probably about ninety-eight percent of this area is uninhabited desert and that the population of Mount Isa is only around 500,000 compared to London's twelve million seems to have eluded everybody. Obviously, the definition of "city" is used very loosely over here, as it is in the USA - in these places, just about everybody refers to their small town or village as the city of such-and-such. In the UK, you're only supposed to call yourself a city if you've got either a university or a cathedral, and even then you have to get permission from the Queen. So you can see that the statistics I was presented with by the coach driver on arrival made me want to sit down for a while! There were no Taxi's waiting at the Terminal as is normally the case whenever I arrive anywhere, so I used the payphone outside to call for one. I was driven through deserted streets to my hotel thinking that Mount Isa looked like a ghost town on first inspection - but it was only 9.30 in the morning and I supposed that all the miners were working hard down the mines, even at the weekend, and everything would spring to life in the evening. I really should stop jumping to these wild conclusions. This was fine by me, anyhow, as I'd been up all night on the coach and was only too happy to find my room and sink into a blissful sleep. I rose again in the early evening and threw on whatever came to hand - in this heat, it doesn't pay to be fussy. Having had time to think back over my past experiences of outback Australia I didn't really expect to find much out there, but I figured that since I was stuck in this place for a day or so I might as well see why it is that everyone seems to hate it so much. It felt like a Stephen King Novel. Although it was gone six on a Saturday evening, the only sound as I walked along the main road was the faint puff of the wind and the chirruping of Crickets in the brush. There were cars parked at strange angles on parking spaces along the central reservations. Shop doors stood invitingly open, but when I went in there was nobody serving - perhaps they were out the back, but there really wasn't a soul in sight. I honestly expected at any moment to turn the corner and find somebody slumped dead over the steering wheel of a car, horn blaring loudly into the night. Sometimes in outback Australia it really does feel as though you are the last person left alive - I imagine a lot of Hollywood sci-fi screenwriters get their inspiration travelling through places like this. I wanted to shout out: "Exorcist, Anyone need an Exorcist?" I strolled around the local supermarket, which was trading under the bewildering name of "Silly Solly's", and was intrigued by the variety of goods for sale: Records and CD's, food, toiletries, desks and furniture, Ironmongery, DIY accessories, wood and carpentry products. This place had it all, except perhaps for anybody to sell it to. Feeling sorry for the kind looking chap behind the counter (Solly?), I decided to buy a book from him and went to find a cash point - even this was a struggle. When I did eventually find a machine that would accept my card, it turned out to be quite the most complex thing I've ever tried to fathom in my life. There was no screen, just an endless array of buttons labelled with different combinations of options, and it shot my receipt out with such gusto that it whizzed past and landed in the gutter where it was run over by the only car I'd seen all day. After buying my book and having a long, if slightly inaccurate, conversation with Solly about what a lovely place Mount Isa was, I strolled into Macca's figuring that there's always going to be somebody in a McDonalds. The young lad behind the counter was obviously startled by my sudden appearance and whipped himself up into a frenzy of activity - clearly, he hadn't seen another soul for days. I jokingly asked him if some sort of plague had swept through the town and if I should be keeping my eye out for mutants, but he just stared at me. Then he got my order wrong, but I suppose I can't expect miracles even in a place like this. I haven't got a clue what to do next. I had been told that the main thing worth doing in town was the three hour mine tour. There are a labyrinth of tunnels - three hundred and fifty kilometres of them - criss-crossing underneath me as I walk, in which the miners spend their days digging out copper, zinc and silver. If there was one thing I really wanted to do while I was here, it was explore the mines - if only to find out if that was where the alien invaders were stashing all the bodies. The tour supposedly takes visitors down in one hell of a cage designed to hold nearly two hundred people and promises a day you'll remember for the rest of the day, but it has apparently been fully booked all week and there are no tours at weekends. How it has been fully booked I will never know as I've not seen more than a handful of people all day, but these mysteries help to make up the charm of Australia! I slinked back to the hotel in semi-darkness, having wandered the streets of Mount Isa and found nothing to detain me there, and occupied myself by counting the cockroaches and other assorted bugs exploring my wall. This is another fascinating thing about the outback. In other places a bug in your room would have people rushing to the local health authority, pointing madly at the hotel and screaming. Here, if you haven't got an infestation of some kind in at least some of the rooms then you should complain - after all, how can you expect to live in the middle of the biggest expanse of wilderness in the world, surrounded by bush and desert, and not expect to have a few creepy-crawlies around the place! I made myself a coffee, started on my new book "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", and turned in. Again.
You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2
