After boarding the bus earlier in the morning than should be legal, our first stop for the day was at the small town of Winton, just over 150 miles from Hughenden. We were now well and truly in the outback, the roads being very rarely much more than dirt tracks anymore, but the scenery was starting to become more interesting and the driver was forever pointing out some strange landmark or another. You really have to have your wits about you driving on Australian ...

Travelling across outback Australia is quite unlike anything else I've ever experienced, and never fails to take me by surprise however often I do it. Once your coach leaves one town, it's often hours before you arrive at the next and on the way the view consists almost entirely of red desert, scattered rocks, roadside grave markers and distant mountains. That isn't to say that journeys across Australia are boring by any means - quite the opposite, in fact. The s...

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 ...