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, I remember being struck by the fact that nobody around me seemed to be over thirty years old. The streets had been packed with people either heading for, or coming out of nightclubs, and the club I ended up in, on the advice of the hotel porter, was packed to capacity with people who seemed to have forgotten that they were supposed to put on clothes before they went out. Going out to a club in Townsville without putting on clothes first seemed, however, to be pretty much the norm, so I didn't bother pointing this out to anyone - Instead, I spent most of the night until the early hours dancing madly and releasing my body of any sweat that the Australian climate had so far missed, and then staggered back to the hotel and fell into bed just in time to get up again. The only thing which concerned me slightly about the evening was that the DJ kept going on about the fact that he had tabs of ecstasy to give away as prizes throughout the night, something which he didn't seem at all worried about anyone finding out and which I took to suggest that the local police force must consist of people just about as young, laid back and carefree as everyone else in town.

Perhaps it's because I've arrived mid-week, but this time Townsville seems strangely quiet and deserted - almost as though it's become involved in some B-movie about aliens swooping into small town Australia and abducting the population. If I had seen a ball of tumbleweed blowing past the end of a street while I was exploring this afternoon, I wouldn't have even stopped to do a double-take. The temperature was also 37C today, which is just about 100F, so you can imagine how much fun it was walking around unable to find anyone to direct me to a cafe of any sort. I have, however, bought myself a new camera which set me back a small fortune but should allow me to get some great photos if the floods ever subside enough to get me at least someway into the outback.

At the "Great Barrier Reef Wonderland" just outside town, visitors with some spare cash can fork out to visit the Omnimax Theatre, which is basically a giant three hundred and sixty degree cinema like the ones which seem to be appearing all over the world, except that the one in Townsville somehow manages to project the image onto the floor as well as the walls and domed ceiling, giving the impression that you are totally immersed in the underwater world of the Great Barrier Reef. Like the Americans, Australians do like to try to top everyone else. Next door, the Townsville aquarium puts on a show in which a SCUBA diver fitted with a special mask containing a microphone and earpiece swims down into a tank from where he is able to hold a two way conversation with the audience. As you can imagine, this is quite a strange experience to say the least, as I was able to simply stand next to the glass and ask a question and the diver would immediately answer, swimming over to whatever it was I was asking about. It was like watching a documentary on a giant television screen, and being able to interact with the presenter - a number of smaller children in the aquarium clearly had absolutely no idea what was going on and spent much of their time pressed up against the glass trying to touch the diver or pick up the fish inside. And talking of kids, the aquarium also provides a "petting tank" into which they are actively encouraged to stick their hands and stroke the fish - I heard one parent asking the guide if she could arrange for a couple of sharks to accidentally get into the tank - something which made his daughter cry. Some people really shouldn't be allowed to have children.

Townsville is pretty much stopsville as far as my journey goes at the moment. Another of the curious things you have to get used to while travelling within Australia is that there is just so much empty space over here that there isn't any need to build the type of complex road system we're used to in England. In the outback you might be lucky to come across a small town every few hundred kilometres, so the road into that town will usually be nothing more than a dirt track winding through the desert until it finally links with one of the handful of major roads in the country. For this reason, it is very easy indeed to find yourself stuck somewhere during the wet season - elsewhere in the world you would look at the weather report, see that the road you normally take is flooded, and simply go another way. In Australia, there isn't another way. You either buy yourself an underwater car or stay where you are for sometimes weeks on end waiting for the floods to subside. In my case, the only major road from here to Darwin is currently under several feet of water, which leaves me with two choices: either I stay here indefinitely and check back at the coach terminal every day to see if the coaches are running out towards Darwin yet, or I start to retrace my steps back down the coast towards Sydney and waste about a week going around the long way. Even if the roads do clear and the coaches start running again, I have to sign a release to the effect that there's no guarantee the floodwaters won't rise again en route and accept that I might have to be dropped off in the middle of nowhere while the coaches return to Townsville. This is not a pleasant prospect.

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.