Townsville

  27/09/2011
  The temperatures here on the east coast are very much cooler than those we were experiencing in the north of W A (Kunnunura) and then Katherine in N T. They are now getting regular daytime temperatures of 38/39/C. We are suffering highs of 28C!, need to watch that we don’t catch cold.
  Drove out a few K’s north of Townsville to Cape Pallarenda, a conservation park. We did a bit of bush bashing ending up at a very nice secluded beach where the rocks there were covered in oyster shell. In the park there are the buildings of a first WW Quarantine station with a chamber used for disinfecting immigrants coming ashore. A bit gruesome really. Later we spent a couple of hours bird watching from hides around a freshwater lagoon, after having to drive off road to get to them. We are pushing our luck on some of these tracks we think.

  28/09/2011
There is a bit of déjà vu going on at the minute as we are actually stuck in Townsville waiting for Australia Snail Mail  to deliver a package to us, just as we were in Broome. I had to send one of my super expensive hearing aids to Perth for repair, it stopped working whilst we were in Broome, a month ago. The repair has been done and it was posted  Poste Restante to Townsville last Wednesday, and has yet to arrive. We would like to be up in Cairns by the weekend but being stuck here is not too much of a hardship.
  Today we went south for a few K’s to another beauty spot, called Alligator Creek in Bowling Green National Park  ----    a strange name. As we are getting to  the end of the dry season there isn’t much water in the creek. Just enough in places to get wet but hardly enough to swim in. The creek must be quite spectacular when it is in flood. We could guarantee a swim back in the sea back  at Townsvilles’ ‘no sand’ beach, so we did realising the last time we swam in the sea in was the Indian Ocean, the other side of the continent.