My guide book describes Mount Isa as "a smog covered mining town with very little to offer, where many backpackers simply give up and catch a bus!". Nevertheless, the roads have now opened up this far and I'd exhausted all the possibilities of Townsville so I thought it was time to press on. Mount Isa may be over eight hundred kilometres and a whole night on a coach away from Townsville, but it's also eight hundred kilometres closer to Darwin and I wanted to get ...

Townsville doesn't seem to match up much to my recollections of it from my previous trip here in 1995. As we approached the city on that ocassion, our coach captain Brent had explained that it was a city with a population of one hundred thousand - an impressive number for a country where the average town population can be anything from 2 up - and that this was mainly made up of young people. He hadn't been joking, either. Strolling through the town in the evening...

Okay, let me see if I've got this straight. Ville is French for Town, so I'm essentially staying in a place called Town Town? Okay, thought so. Just checking. On my last night in Cairns before catching my coach to Townsville early this morning, I went out for a spot of late night shopping and ended up plonking myself down in the food hall at the Pier shopping centre for some local fish and chips. I asked the girl at the counter what I should expect if I ordered ...

My coach to Townsville doesn't leave until tomorrow morning, so I decided to use my last free day in Northern Queensland by taking the Scenic Train to Kuranda. This, if you are just passing through the area on your way further north, is considered the traditionally touristy thing to do. The village of Kuranda is a small outpost at the northern end of the Atherton Tablelands which happily thrives on the influx of tourists to its Zoo, Aviary, Butterfly Farm and ou...

Many people outside Australia get Cape Tribulation and the Daintree rainforest confused, and use them interchangeably to refer to the same place - probably because tourists heading for the Daintree often stay at the Cape. In fact, Cape Trib (as it tends to be known) is actually a relatively small township on a headland within the much greater Daintree rainforest. Although there are other places to stay, the Cape is probably the most popular destination in the rai...