Fancying a break from Townsville, we headed inland towards the former gold rush town of Charters Towers.

On the way we took a diversion to Ravenswood, also an ex gold town, but much smaller and now largely abandoned. However, a lot of the buildings have been restored which makes it worth a look.

We debated staying overnight and spending the evening in one of the two traditional outback hotels, but decided to move on. The camp site would have been a fair walk back afterwards, plus the place seemed a bit dead for a good night out.

Charters Towers used to be known as 'The World' in the late nineteenth century because it was so wealthy its inhabitants could get anything they wanted there - everything in the world was meant to be at their doorstep. Like Ravenswood, many of the buildings have been preserved or restored, but unlike its smaller neighbour Charters Towers still has some semblance of life about it.

On our first day there, we went to the information site and watched a short film about how gold was discovered in 1872 by an Aboriginal boy called Jupiter who was 'employed' by a group of prospectors to look after their horses. One of the staff was at great pains to point out that the prospectors looked after young Jupiter afterwards and sent him to a good school in Sydney. On the other hand, we read in the adjoining museum that Jupiter died as a horse wrangler so he obviously didn't get much of a share of the vast wealth that his discovery sparked off.

We then had a look round the town and admired some of the admittedly still handsome Victorian buildings. One was the former stock exchange, set up to help fund the mining operations in and around the town. The world's gold price was once fixed there, rather than, say, London or New York, which gives you some idea of how important Charters Towers once was. The gold eventually ran out, of course, and people drifted away. There is still some mining going on in the area, but on far smaller a scale than in the town's heyday.

We discovered to our delight that Charters Towers had a drive-in cinema, something we've always fancied going to. It was only open at the weekend, but luckily it was a Saturday night so off we went.

The cinema had two methods of listening to the sound - you could hang the traditional speaker on your window or you could tune the car radio to the cinema's frequency. We opted for the former, so we could feel like we were in Grease, or an old American movie.

There was a good crowd, with some teenagers being dropped off and sitting and watching the films from the comfort of sleeping bags. We also saw families who set up tables and chairs, wrapped themselves in blankets and settled in comfortably for the evening. Many of the patrons also availed themselves of the hot dogs, burgers etc at the cinema's café, though you could take your own food and drink if you wanted. The two rather large women in the car next to us munched their way through what looked like supersized meals from Macdonalds and followed that down with donuts.

All in all it was an excellent evening for only $7.50 each compared to the $12-15 at other Australian cinemas, and for that we had a double bill. Ok, the films weren't what I personallly would have chosen - 17 Again and The Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past - but they turned out to be quite entertaining.

After Charters Towers, we carried on westwards to a small town called Hughenden. We hadn't realised quite how small it was, because when we arrived on Sunday afternoon we discovered that there were no food shops open. As we hadn't stocked up beforehand, we had a very basic dinner that night!

Hughenden advertises itself as a dinosaur town because of the fossils found in the area. We had a look in the local museum at a replica of a reasonably impressive Muttaburrasaurus skeleton - the original is now in Brisbane. There wasn't much else, however, apart from some interesting background on the settlement of the area and the development of the cattle and sheep farming industry.

Richard