Okay, let me see if I've got this straight. Ville is French for Town, so I'm essentially staying in a place called Town Town? Okay, thought so. Just checking. On my last night in Cairns before catching my coach early this morning, I went out for a spot of late night shopping and ended up plonking myself down in the food hall at the Pier shopping centre for some local fish and chips. I asked the girl at the counter what I should expect if I ordered the "Traditional Fish and Chips meal", and after being told that it was Sea Perch I tried to explain to her all about England being the home of Fish and Chips and how I'd never heard of Sea Perch. To be fair, she did seem to be genuinely interested in what I was telling her, nodding and smiling back as if to say "Humour the mad Pommie - He might have a knife". Fish is the one thing which can constantly surprise you in Australia because you are very unlikely to ever get the same thing twice. On my travels, I have discovered much to my delight that walking into a chip shop and saying "fish and chips please" will result in something different wherever you go - I really don't want to go back to England and have to go back to Cod or Rock. After tonight, my favourite fish is currently Sea Perch, although Red Snapper and Sea Bass are coming a quite close joint second. My last meal in Cairns was somewhat ruined by the waiter, who was clearly on some sort of brain-cell sharing scheme - having placed my steaming hot plate of Sea Perch, chips and mushy peas onto my table and turned around to walk a total of twenty feet to fetch the salt from the adjoining table, I turned back ten seconds later to find him in the process of emptying my plate into a black plastic sack. We then stared at each other for what seemed like an age before he said "Were you eating that?" Not knowing what to do in this situation, I then reverted to the standard British fall back position of being terribly polite in awkward situations and I actually heard myself apologising to him for having left the table for a few seconds before returning to the counter to order again. This is probably why the British Empire fell. However you look at the name, Townsville is pretty much stopsville as far as my journey goes at the moment. Another of the curious things you have to get used to while travelling within Australia is that there is just so much empty space over here that there really isn't any need to build the type of complex road system we're used to in England. In the outback you might be lucky to come across a small town every few hundred kilometres, so the road into that town will usually be nothing more than a dirt track winding through the desert until it finally links with one of the handful of major roads in the country. For this reason, it is very easy indeed to find yourself stuck somewhere during the wet season - elsewhere in the world you would look at the weather report and see that the road you normally take is flooded, and simply go another way. In Australia, there isn't another way. You either buy yourself an underwater car or stay where you are for sometimes weeks on end waiting for the floods to subside. In my case, the only major road from here to Darwin is currently under several feet of water, which leaves me with two choices: either I stay here indefinitely and check back at the coach terminal every day to see if the coaches are running out towards Darwin yet, or I start to retrace my steps back down the coast towards Sydney and waste about a week going around the long way. Even if the roads do clear and the coaches start running again, I have to sign a release to the effect that there's no guarantee the floodwaters won't rise again en route and I'll have to be dropped off in the middle of nowhere while the coaches return to Townsville. This is not a pleasant prospect. Townsville doesn't even seem to match up to my recollections of it from my previous trip here in 1995. Back then, it struck me as something of a young person's city and I wrote in my diary that I hadn't seen anybody who looked over thirty in all the time I'd been here - despite the fact that the population at the time was over one hundred thousand, which is impressively large for Australia where the average town population can be anything from two to a few hundred. On that occasion the porter at the hotel recommended a particular nightclub to me, which I shall not name for obvious reasons, where the DJ spent most of the night totally zonked out of his brains and announcing to the crowd that he would be giving tabs of ecstasy away as prizes throughout the night. I remember crowds of smiling faces, beautiful girls filling every street on the way to the nearest bar or club. Perhaps it's because I've arrived mid-week, but this time Townsville seems strangely quiet and deserted - almost as though it's become involved in some B-movie about aliens swooping into small town Australia and abducting the population. If I had seen a ball of tumbleweed blowing past the end of a street while I was exploring this afternoon, I wouldn't have even stopped to do a double-take. The temperature was also 37C today, which is just about 100F, so you can imagine how much fun it was walking around unable to find anyone to direct me to a cafe of any sort. I have, however, bought myself a new camera which set me back a small fortune but should allow me to get some great photos if the floods ever subside enough to get me at least someway into the outback.
You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2
