August 15, 16, 17 Townsville

A bit of catching up to do in this report! On Friday we decided to travel north to Paluma Range National Park – as we have unlimited kilometres on the hire car, why not use them? It was 60 km north of Townsville and then 22 km west, 18 km of which was uphill, narrow and winding. Paluma Range NP is the start of the Wet Tropics, a series of national parks extending north to the Daintree. For a rainforest, it was quite dry but there were some good views down over the coastline and out to sea towards Palm Island which is an aboriginal reserve. Yesterday we went into the city to visit Reef HQ and were very pleasantly surprised. It’s a bit like Sydney Aquarium except that it’s devoted to the reef. It was fascinating to see the reef fish and other species close up in a number of aquaria. While we were there we saw a Dive Show in the main tank – a scuba diver fitted with a microphone entered the tank and provided a terrific commentary and insights into the variety of sharks and other creatures. At 3 o’clock there was a feeding tour and the guides took us around the various tanks as the fish were fed. It was an absolute frenzy once the food was tossed in to the two larger tanks. All in all a very interesting and entertaining visit. Mum went to have a swim but unfortunately the pool was due to close – have to check the times more carefully. Townsville has been celebrating its diversity of cultures this week in the form of a five-day Culture Fest. We decided to check it out and were very glad we did. I counted over 25 different food stalls and we only sampled three of them. Apart from the food there were performances from different groups and a range of market type stalls. Today we began with breakfast at Sizzlers – an all you could eat affair for $14 – needless to say we didn’t require any lunch. There were two Sunday markets in Townsville today – one was largely second-hand junk so we didn’t stay there long but the main markets in Townsville’s Mall were quite good and we were able to pick up some reasonably priced vegies. We were pleased to find a stall selling tropical fruit so lashed out and bought a sample of each. The photo shows what we bought: the large dark green fruit (back left) is black sapote; the yellow pieces are canistel; on the right are carabola or star fruit; the two brown pieces are sapodilla and the prickly looking ones are rambutan.