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 the "Traditional Fish and Chips meal", and after being told that it was Sea Perch I tried to explain to her all about England being the home of Fish and Chips and how I'd never heard of Sea Perch. To be fair, she did seem to be genuinely interested in what I was telling her, nodding and smiling back as if to say "Humour the mad Pommie - He might have a knife.

Fish is another thing which can constantly surprise you in Australia because you are very unlikely to ever get the same thing twice. On my travels, I have discovered much to my delight that walking into a chip shop and saying "fish and chips please" will result in you being handed a plate of something different wherever you go - I really don't want to go back to England and have to get used to cod and chips again. After tonight, my favourite fish is currently Sea Perch, although Red Snapper and Sea Bass are coming a quite close joint second.

My last meal in Cairns was somewhat ruined by the cleaner at the shopping centre, who was clearly on some sort of brain-cell sharing scheme - having placed my steaming hot plate of fish, chips and mushy peas onto my table and turned around to walk a total of twenty feet to fetch the salt from the adjoining table, I turned back ten seconds later to find him in the process of emptying my untouched plate into a black plastic sack. We then stared at each other for what seemed like an age before he said "Were you eating that?" Not knowing what to do in this situation, I simply fell back on the standard British response of being terribly polite in awkward situations and I actually heard myself apologising to him for having left the table for a few seconds before returning to the counter to order again. This is probably why the British Empire fell.

It poured down with rain all night before I left Cairns, and continued to do so for most of the day - but the timing was good as I spent most of it either travelling or undercover. My first stop on the way to Townsville was to take a covered boat cruise on Lake Barrine in the Atherton Tablelands, and luckily for those of us travelling without umbrellas, the boat was already waiting when we arrived at the dock and we were able to rush on board without getting too wet. Even if some of my fellow travellers had been complaining a little about the weather, the cruise certainly cheered everyone up - for starters, we hadn't even finished getting on board before a tame duck was waddling up the boarding ramp with us, darting in and out of our feet with apparent lack of concern for his own safety. Making his way inside to join us, Donald (as we christened him) teetered on the edge of the top step down into the cabin, flapped away for a moment and then hopped down to the next - and once in the dry with the rest of us, he spent at least ten minutes rummaging around for food in the bags of anyone foolish enough not to have secured them properly. After we got under way, the captain scooped Donald up and carefully placed him back in the water, but he just wasn't going to be deterred from joining us on our cruise, swimming along after us for some time before finally noticing something interesting on the bank and going off to investigate. I expect these daily visits from tourists are probably enough to keep the ducks fed for a lifetime.

Donald certainly wasn't the only local creature to know he was on to a good thing. As we sailed along, pelicans were forever flying low over the boat and coming in to swoop down and grab food from the captain, who took great pleasure in leaning over the edge and holding out giant chunks of something unidentifiable which they would snatch right out of his hand. Bobbing along in the water eyeing us suspiciously, the pelicans looked almost to be made of plastic - but as soon as they decided there was something to eat on offer they would launch themselves into the air and fly along next to us, revealing a grace that I simply wouldn't have expected a pelican to have. Flapping a couple of times, these giant birds would literally glide along beside us for what seemed like an impossible distance without plunging into the water, sticking like glue to the side until the captain decided to hold something out, at which point they would just snatch it, do a complete one-eighty and land back in the water to eat it. Several other pelicans who had been watching would then decide that this method looked too much like hard work and simply mug the poor bird who had just put all the effort in. Needless to say, we all crowded around the windows on each side of the cabin, safe from the driving rain outside, and watched the whole show in comfort as though we were at the zoo.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.