Townsville
Thanks to our early departure from Whitsunday Islands National Park, we found ourselves with an extra day before our reservation in Cairns. Without a full day’s drive ahead of us we were able to take our time getting out of Airlie Beach, the little tourist town nearest the Whitsunday Islands with a big partying reputation. First order of business: bask in the car’s air conditioning. It’s amazing just how sweaty, sticky and gross you can get after barely 48 hours in the tropics with no showers, sleeping in a hot, poorly ventilated tent.
While we sat in the car, relishing the wonderfully conditioned air, we consulted our trusty Lonely Planet guide book and decided that it would be best to leave Airlie that day and drive up to Townsville, another North Queensland city with a reputation for lots of nightlife. We didn’t have to leave the Whitsunday area until sometime after 3:00 in order to make it to Townsville before dark, so I went straight to an internet café (shocking, I know) to check my email and reply to anything urgent. Normally I would have done that from my phone, but my iPhone had gone dark on me that morning after I pulled it out to listen to some tunes as we were packing up the camp site. Losing my iPhone was very difficult, not because it’s an expensive piece of equipment, but because I’m a bit of an Internet junky and—especially while I’m traveling—that’s the way I usually get my fix.
Alissa and I spent some time on the beachfront, taking in the view of Airlie’s beach (muddy and ugly at low tide) and reading to each other on a park bench. From there, we moved to a sofa on the patio of a café facing the waterfront, which had pretty decent coffee and an excellent warm brownie, but was pretty pricy for Airlie. Their sofa was comfortable enough, though, and made for a great place to read and wait for Pat to find us, which he finally did. Overall, the value of Airlie Beach seemed to me to lie exclusively in it’s location as the jumping-off point for camping the Whitsundays, beyond that it was expensive, inconvenient and unmemorable. Travelers in North Queensland, budget or otherwise, would be well-advised to spend their time in Byron Bay rather than Airlie Beach if they’re looking for a small, remote town in North Queensland.
Townsville, true to its reputation, had a decent nightlife, seemingly disproportionate to its size. The main draw for Townsville, beyond its many pubs and clubs, was Magnetic Island, as I discovered while reading about the area and talking to other travelers in our hostel. Sadly, because our stay was merely a brief, unplanned stopover, we never made it to the Island and I can’t tell you anything about it; interested parties are invited to kindly Google it themselves. Our hostel, The Reef, was located just off the Esplanade (the main drag along the waterfront), directly adjacent to what seemed the rowdiest strip of nightlife.
The immediate proximity to the bars meant that the common areas, almost all of which were outside, were very noisy at night, but they did a pretty good job of soundproofing the rooms. Sadly, all the soundproofing in the world couldn’t prevent the two loud German girls—Germans are everywhere in Australia—who barged back into Alissa’s room at four or five in the morning from waking her up. Then one of them proceeded to turn off the AC, and the get up and shut it off again after Alissa turned it back on; eventually Alissa had to tell her that she shouldn’t have paid for a dorm with AC if she wasn’t going to use it.
Those problems aside, the hostel was pretty cool and unique. It was basically a group of buildings arranged around a series of courtyards and passageways, rather than being a single structure. It had lots of amenities, though some of them, like the video games and dart board weren’t really in working condition. The one cool thing we did get to use were the hammocks, which Alissa and I read in until far too late at night.
Although I stayed back at the hostel to write about our time in Sydney, Pat and Alissa went out for some drinks. They were able to drink at Molly Malone’s, the pub across the street, but they were turned away from at least one club due to Pat’s refusal to don footwear and general dirty hippy-ness. That was pretty much my favorite story of our time with Pat.
The next morning, before hitting the road, we had a big, mostly delicious breakfast at The Coffee Club on the Esplanade. Sadly, though, the steak that came with the Big Breakfast was mostly leathery and the service was atrociously slow. Don’t go to The Coffee Club (at least, the one in Townsville, which we didn’t realize was part of a chain until we saw one in the mall in Cairns) unless you don’t mind overpaying and waiting 20 minutes for your coffee to arrive.
