Townsville

Now everyone we speak to says 'Why do you want to go to Townsville?", "it's a dive" and "it's full of drunk bogans". Despite this our research had concluded that this may actually be a place we would like. Townsville is a 4 hour coach journey from Mission Beach as we had a 45 minute lunch stop in Tully, so we arrived around 3pm. The coach driver enthusiastically told us about all the things Tully would have to offer whilst we stopped. The highlight of which was to get our cameras and phones ready for a selfie with the giant mud crab. We had to time to kill so we did just that. I'm pretty sure we were the only people on the bus that bothered though. We have far lower levels of street cred to maintain obviously.

We are staying at Rambutan which is quite possibly the nicest looking hostel we have stayed in. This is definitely somewhere I could spend a few days relaxing in the rooftop pool and bar. Unfortunately we only have one night here as we are off to Magnetic Island tomorrow.

On the way to Rambutan my phone rapidly deteriorated and by the time we arrived the screen was blurry and the touchscreen was no longer responding to touch. Simon found a place that could fix the screen for $80 so we headed there to get it sorted. To my surprise they said they could have it fixed in half an hour which was amazing. The guy was running a bit behind though so it was gone 5:30pm by the time it was done. He did chuck in a free tempered glass screen protector for me though to protect it against future accidents so i can't really complain. My phone is now good as new which is incredible. I feel like I have a new phone! Happy times!

Fixing the phone did eat up into our Townsville exploring time though which is a bit of a shame. We did spot some awesome graffiti on the way back to the hostel though which was cool. We also found a really nice area called City Lane with a few nice eateries and wine bars which we went back to after dinner for a drink. I feel like Townsville bears a slight resemblance to Bedminster. Back in the day it was a complete dive however now it is slowly becoming gentrified and hipster. It would be interesting to come back to Townsville in a few years time to see how it has evolved.

One thing I did really want to do here is watch the sunset from the top of Castle Hill but because we went to get the phone fixed, we missed it. Instead, I have somehow convinced Simon to watch the sunrise tomorrow instead. Apparently it rises around 6am and it takes an hour to walk there so it's going to be an early start.Read more