When tourists and travellers plan a trip north along the coast of Queensland, relatively few seem to bother with Townsville. After Airlie Beach and the Whitsundays, the priority for most people is to get to Cairns as soon as possible; if they visit Townsville then it is just for an overnight halt or to hop over to nearby Magnetic Island for the day.

When we looked at the map, we were in the majority camp. Our only aim was to break up the journey and to recharge our portable battery. Townsville sounded like a really dull sort of place - how could anywhere named "Towns Town" be interesting? In the end, however, we stayed for 10 very enjoyable days.

We found a campsite just over the road from the beach and with a lovely view out to Magnetic Island (which we visited - see Katy's separate blog). For the first few days our nearest neighbours were two Irish guys and a girl in a small, beaten-up, old campervan. For some reason we couldn't fathom, they spent nearly every day watching a portable TV. We also couldn't work out how they all managed to sleep in the van given its size.

Townsville was founded in 1864 and named after a politician, businessman and slave-trader called Robert Towns. (Yes, slavery was meant to be illegal at that time, but he did it anyway, kidnapping Pacific islanders to work in Queensland sugar plantations.) Towns owned the farming rights to vast tracts of land in what was then an undeveloped area of the country. In order to maximise the land's value, he needed a port and sent an employee called John Melton Black to find a suitable location. This he did and Townsville was created.

Townsville is now the second-largest city in Queensland after Brisbane - we had thought Cairns was larger, mainly because all the guides talk about it. It is still a working port, but large areas of the town have been redeveloped and it has a generally lively, but pleasant feel.

The authorities have made a good job in particular of the beach front (known as the Strand) which stretches for more than a mile. The path is shaded by palm trees, there are play areas for children dotted about and free barbecue and picnic areas as well as cafes, bars and restaurants. Many locals use the area for exercise. We saw a variety of activities such as swimming, cycling, roller-blading, jogging and power-walking - well, some people started out running or walking fast, but quite a few seemed to be merely stumbling along after a while.

Australia is a sports-mad country and in Queensland the sport of choice is Rugby League. (If you don't like sport, then skip over the next dozen or so paragraphs as you will probably be bored rigid.) Townsville is the home of the North Queensland Cowboys and we discovered that they were playing at home in a Saturday evening game against a team called the Roosters. For some reason, the media in Australia almost always refers to a team by its nickname rather than its place-name, so it took us about three days to find out that the Roosters were from Sydney. We found an official Cowboys shop in the centre of town and bought tickets behind one of the goal areas for only $18 (about £9). The shop staff also told us that we could catch a special bus from near our campsite direct to the ground as we wouldn't be able to park.

We arrived quite early so we could suss out what was going on. The stadium was only small with a capacity of about 25,000 and it was noticeable that the atmosphere was very friendly. Yes, there were hard-core footy fans, but there were also many families and even groups of girls in attendance. People were wandering around eating pies, burgers, chips etc and drinking beer. Well, we had to join in, didn't we?

Before the main event, there was an under-20s match between the Cowboys and Roosters and when we arrived the score was 6-4 to the visitors. We found our seats - a perfectly good view, by the way, despite the bargain price - and watched the half-time show put on by dozens of girls prancing around and shaking pom-poms in the Cowboys' blue and yellow colours.

Despite the Roosters being third-bottom of the under-20s league, they completely dismantled the home side in the second half, scoring try after try at our end of the field. Not surprisingly, the Cowboy fans gave their team some verbal abuse for their ineptness. "Bring back the little girls," one wag shouted, "They'd tackle better than you bloody lot!"

We wondered whether we were bad luck for the Cowboys as the omens didn't look good for the main match. Although the Cowboys were in the top half of the table and the Roosters stone bottom, the home team were missing their four best players as they were preparing to play for Queensland (more on that game later) while the visitors were lacking only one. The pundits were predicting a narrow away victory. Our feeling of being Jonahs seemed to be confirmed when the Roosters scored in the very first minute and again in the fourth, putting them 10-0 ahead.

We were sat just behind a group of mainly middle-aged women who were serious fans and who screamed and shouted in a mix of encouragement (for the Cowboys) and abuse (for the Roosters and the referees). The noise level varied according to what was happening on the pitch. Sometimes there were just routine cries of "Come on Tronc!" (yes, that really was the player's name) or "Get off his head!" (when the Roosters were holding down a Cowboy).

Any controversial incident provoked a predictable rise in volume, which reached a crescendo when a Rooster committed a dangerous tackle on one of the Cowboys: "Send him off! Send him OFF, ref!! SEND HIM OFF!!! OFF!!! OFF!!! OFF!!!" For some reason, however, the much-abused referee didn't even send the guilty player to the sin-bin for a few minutes. When the visiting captain was injured and carried off by the medical staff, the gentle ladies of North Queensland maligned his manliness and suggested in a forthright manner that he stop malingering and get back on the pitch. It turned out that he had broken his ankle, which would have made playing on a little difficult!

We found all this extremely entertaining of course - check out our video section to hear some of the shouting - and I think Katy found it better than the sporting spectacle we had come to watch. In fact it turned out to be a tense, exciting game, with the Cowboys rallying speedily from that 10-point deficit to take a 24-16 half-time lead. The second period was tense with the home team dominating but unable to score - mainly due to some atrocious tactical kicking when close to the goal line. The Roosters pulled it back to 24-22 and only some desperate defence in the last three or four minutes saw the Cowboys emerge with a win. It turned out we weren't bad luck after all.

I mentioned earlier that some of the Cowboys best players weren't available for this game because they were playing for their state. Every year, Queensland take on New South Wales in the best of three matches - an event known as the State Of Origin series. It's called that because you represent the state you were born in (or first played in, if you come from overseas) rather than the state in which you currently play. And it is a HUGE event, with both states getting really worked up.

The first game had taken place while we were in Yeppoon and I watched it on TV at our camp, but this time we decided we would go into town and spend the evening in a bar with a big screen. We chose an Irish bar so Katy could have some Guinness because she decided she needed the iron. Honest.

The bar wasn't as packed as we thought it might be, but passions were running high among the fans - most of whom were Queenslanders (in maroon) of course, though with a brave handful from NSW (in blue). Queensland had won the first game and were heavy favourites, and although NSW were at home, they seemed intent on committing sporting suicide. A mixture of sloppy tackling, fumbling the ball and terrible passes saw NSW gift the Maroons an 18-0 lead.

The home side were back in the match by half-time, however, trailing only 18-10. NSW closed the gap to 18-14 and for about 10 minutes it looked like they could go on and win, with an injury-hit Queensland team hanging on desperately. The storm was weathered, however, and Queensland scored again in the last minute for a 22-14 victory. This was their fourth Origin series win in succession, which as the commentators kept telling us, was a record.

Although I've never been a great Rugby League fan (nor has Katy, unsurprisingly), we both enjoyed the live game we watched and the ones on TV. The standard is much higher than RL in England - which is made obvious when the two nations meet. I was quite proud of myself, by the way, for picking out the Queensland player who was named man of the match. He wasn't one of the fleet-footed try-scorers, but a big forward whose job seemed to be to tackle everything in blue when NSW had possession and to run up the middle and grind out the tough yards when his team had the ball. When he was on the pitch in the first half, Queensland dominated; when he went off injured for a while, they struggled; and when he returned, the crisis passed.

Ok, that's enough sport for now, let's talk about something completely different. Beer. Oh alright, not so very different in many ways.

One thing that has really disappointed us in Australia has been the beer. Most of it is just cold and fizzy and the different brands almost indistinguishable from each other. However, in Townsville we found a welcome exception in a pub called The Brewery, which brews its own beer. Our favourite was the red, but the stout was pretty good, as were the golden and blonde varieties. It was a relief to have different tastes to choose from, but a shame that they don't sell their beer in bottles.

We don't go to many 'tourist attractions' on our travels, but decided to visit one in Townsville called Reef HQ. The Great Barrier Reef is just offshore and Reef HQ is all about its coral and fish. Katy had enjoyed snorkelling in the Whitsundays and wanted to know a bit more about what she had seen - particularly as she's considering doing a reef dive when we eventually get to Cairns.

I thought that Reef HQ was pretty good, but a little small. We made our way round and I was still looking for the next lot of exhibits when we realised we had seen them all. That said, it was very interesting seeing some of the many, many types of coral. Because it is an exhibit, there are more varieties closer together than occur naturally. There were lots of fish, of course, including sharks, poisonous stonefish, seahorses and tiny cleaner fish.

Anyone who reads this blog or my entries on Facebook probably knows I don't like our tents. I like them even less now and I positively hate the manufacturers.

After a few days on our site in our big Oztrail tent, we decided to shift to an unpowered area because it was a lot cheaper. That meant dismantling and then re-erecting the tent. Tedious, you might think, but not something to get really worked up about. Well, it would have been fine apart from the fact that when we put it back up again we found that one of the main tent pole sections had broken. We hadn't forced it, nothing had caused any undue stress and we had only erected the tent five times in all, but the fibreglass had snapped. Wonderful.

We made do with the small tent that night and I phoned Oztrail to find out our position. "Oh yes, pole sections break all the time," I was told casually, "Any tent supplier will have replacements." I couldn't get a proper answer as to why they use rubbish quality products in the first place.

It turned out to be quite hard to find a shop that actually stocked replacement sections. We eventually found one that sold packs of four, but they didn't have the correct diameter. Luckily the very nice and apologetic salesgirl nipped out the back and found a single section the correct size - a couple of cm short, but that was ok. She gave it to us for free, which was good, and also told us what we had to do to make the repair. Also good. Or so we thought.

The nine pole sections are held together by an elasticated cord. First, we had to 'dig out' the end of the cord from where it lay inside a protective metal sheath and undo the knot. That was fiddly but ok. Then we had to slip off the undamaged sections until we came to the broken one and remove it. Piece of cake. Then we had to push the cord back down each of the sections (including the new one) and re-tie it. Ah, not so easy. Not at all.

For starters, the cord had a slightly frayed end. Even when we trimmed it off, it frayed again, so trying to get it down the small hole inside the pole section was hard. It would go so far, then just refuse to feed through any more. After a frustrating half hour or more, Katy looked down the bore and realised that the hole was imperfect and narrower in one place. She tried another section and although it was awkward, eventually managed to thread it - ok, three more to go.

As the end section was special, and we wanted the replacement section next to it, that meant we had to try the defective one next. An hour and a half later we still hadn't managed it. Even when we superglued the frayed end to a nice point, the b****** thing would NOT go through narrow area. As you may have realised, my mood and language were not particularly fragrant by this time.

We hadn't got anything to use to try to poke the cord down the hole. When we tried to use some fine soldering wire wrapped around the cord to pull it through, it either broke off or made the cord too wide. After a couple of hours we gave up for the day.

The next morning, we tried again - this time by sewing some cotton through the end of the cord, then trying to use the needle as a weight to pull the thread down the hole. This would allow us to pull the cord through. Unfortunately, the only needle we had was so light and the cotton so poor quality, it just got caught on the obstruction. Aargh!!!

I was reduced to wandering around the campsite, asking people if they had a bigger needle and stronger cotton. After a couple of failures, I eventually found a woman who had a proper sewing kit with a darning needle and some decent thread. Using that, we had the pole back together again in no time at all. Shame it had taken eight person-hours to accomplish what should have taken no more than 20 minutes!

Ok, someone out there will tell us we were doing it all wrong, but I still hate Oztrail and I still hate tents!

While in New Zealand, we had come across some cyclists, most of them Dutch and most of them certifiable. They travel around carrying their clothes, tents, food and drink on their bikes as they go. Katy said that she thought we should try it, that it couldn't be too hard. I told her then that she was as barking as the cyclists.

We came across more groups of cyclists in the camp here. Yes, they seemed quite normal, I admit, and were actually very nice people though they did seem to take perverse delight in showing each other how small their equipment was (think about it). There was one fascinating discussion between some of them about whether it was worth carrying the extra weight of a decent frying pan (that cooked properly) or taking a lightweight titanium one (which burned most things).

On the other hand, cycling around a country or continent may have its advantages. One very fit-looking couple in their 50s told us that because of all the energy they expend pedalling away, they have breakfast, two lunches, afternoon tea and then dinner - the latter was so huge it barely fitted into the (outsize, heavy-bottomed) frying pan. Katy later heard them telling some other mental cases, sorry I mean cyclists, that they buy whole cakes and eat them in one go. The other couple said they did the same with litre tubs of ice cream.

I may finally have found the answer to the meaning of life. I shall become a touring cyclist, carrying all my worldly possessions around on my two wheels. I will eat bacon sandwiches and fry-ups and curries and cakes and ice cream every day. And not put on any weight. Heaven!

Richard