Townsville

For the last few years I have been mentioning to Erik that we should head to Townsville to visit a few of my "Contiki" friends. I know I've talked about them on the blog a few times before, but in case you are a new reader, I did a Contiki tour of Europe in 2004 and fortunately I have managed to keep in touch with a few friends from that trip. Two of those guys came to America for our wedding in 2007. One of those guys who made it to our wedding lives in Townsville, a small town in North Queensland. I have been threatening to visit him and another Contiki friend basically since we moved Down Under, and a few months ago there was an airfare sale that I could not pass up, so we decided to spend our first footy-free weekend (the season just ended) in Townsville.

May 2004. Amsterdam.
Marley, center wearing the black shirt, and Joe, in the striped shirt, are the guys we were visiting!

We flew up on Friday night after work and went straight to "The Strand", or the waterfront part of Townsville. We enjoyed dinner on the water at Longboard Bar and Grill before heading to "City Lane", a new laneway in the CBD with outdoor bars and restaurants. We also walked along the main street in Townsville where many young people were out for a big night!

A store in the Townsville CBD. To be "off your tree" means you are crazy.

In the morning we hit the road to Ayr, the town where my Contiki friends grew up and where one currently lives. That friend, Marley, owns a boat and enjoys fishing and crabbing. He and Joe, our other friend, had arranged for us to spend the day on the water catching mud crabs. Erik and I are accustomed to eating Maryland blue crabs, but we had never tasted mud crab and we had never actually been out on a boat trying to catch crabs. The weather could not have been better for our day on the water. Not only did Marley catch mud crabs for us, but he used a net to catch fresh prawns (shrimp) and set up a boiling pot on the beach so that we could eat the crabs and shrimp right there on the water. It was an amazing day!

Joe waiting to pick up the next crab pot

Erik getting in on the action

Marley baiting up a crab pot

Can't remember which cape this is! Note the white dots...those are our crab pots!

Measuring the mud crab to see if it is a keeper

Erik got pretty good at holding these guys!

This one looks big enough to keep. They have to be 15cm across and you can only keep males.

A female sand crab. These are protected, so she went back in the water.

This pelican came to visit while Marley was fishing for prawns.

Docked on the beach

Our view for the feed

After 20 minutes in a boiling pot, our crabs were ready to eat!

The best part, the "nippers"

Out of the water just as the sun was setting

That night we went to watch the local rugby game, as our friend Joe is an assistant coach for the team, the Burdekin Cane Toads. Yes, the mascot is a cane toad!

In the morning we headed down the road about 15 minutes to Alva Beach, where we would check in at Yongala Dive to spend the day scuba diving! Last January when I went diving on the Great Barrier Reef with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, our guide mentioned that her favorite dive site she had ever been to was the SS Yongala shipwreck. The ship sunk in 1911 on the way from Melbourne to Cairns, but the wreck was not discovered until 1958. It has become one of the most popular shipwreck dive sites in the world, and it is known for an abundance of fish and sharks. We did not get a glimpse of any sharks on the day, but we saw TONS of fish, small and large, along with turtles, sea snakes, an eel, and two different types of rays. There are some really BIG fish at the site, grouper and maori wrasse, and also huge schools of barracuda. We saw typical fish similar to those we had seen at other dive sites, but the fish were much larger! We used our GoPro, but we don't have the special case for underwater shooting so unfortunately the footage is not great. The visions are still fresh in my memory, however, and for me the dive quickly became my favorite site of the 10 or so dives I have completed. I highly recommend diving the site with Yongala Dive. Normally you need advanced diver certification to dive below 18 meters, but at this site you can pay a little extra money for "deep dive training" (which only includes a skill or two once you enter the water on the first of two dives), which allows you to dive to 30 meters. Here is a YouTube video that helps give you an idea of what we saw down there!

One we hit the surface, we saw humpback whales playing near the boat. According to our skipper, it was a mom and a calf, probably 2-3 days old. We also saw another whale on the way back to shore, as it is migratory and calving season for the whales. Those sightings just topped off an awesome day of diving!

The tides are crazy, so we ended up having to make a few trips back to the boat to carry things to shore.

That night we set out to find a cane fire. Sugar cane farming is the livelihood of many people in North Queensland, and that night you could see piles of smoke coming from various cane farms. Joe got us pretty close to a fire so that we could see, hear, and smell the cane burning. Apparently there are lots of snakes and wild pigs amongst the cane fields, so the fire gets rid of those pests. After the burn off, the next step is harvesting, and we drove by the plant in Ayr where cane is harvested after it is burned.

One of several cane fires we saw that evening

After another amazing meal from the sea (Marley fed us delicious grilled fish that he had caught earlier in the week), we headed back to Townsville for the night to rest up for our Monday adventure, Magnetic Island.