SO WHERE THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU? STILL STUCK IN F**KING TOWNSVILLE…

From Airlie Beach we pressed on for two days, hoping to get some more miles under our belts to gain more time around Cairns and the tropical north of Queensland - or at least that was the idea. We spent an uneventful night in Bowen, and continued north through incessant heavy rain, through Townsville and on to Taylors Beach, outside Ingham. The conditions were terrible so we decided against going to Magnetic Island off the coast of Townsville where we had planned to go diving. There weren't many highlights to these driving days - but we did see a massive kangaroo hop across the road in one jump, narrowly missing our van and a lorry coming in the opposite direction.

We drove through Townsville, which looked pretty uninspiring in the rain, and decided to press on to Ingham, the next town an hour further north. We negotiated the semi-flooded roads around Ingham and found a campsite at Taylors Beach, where many of the neighbouring fields were already under water. Duncan went for a walk in the rain to admire the muddy estuary nearby reminiscent of the Rio Plata on the border between Argentina and Uruguay (where it also rained a lot, funnily enough). We cooked some delicious steak and onions on the camp bbq outside in the torrential rain and went to bed hoping that the rain would stop in the morning.

No such luck! The rain was still falling heavily when we awoke, so we had no incentive to get up early, which we would later come to regret. The roads had become even more flooded overnight but we were just able to get through the worst of it, driving very slowly back from the coast into Ingham. We were lucky that Ailsa was a big old girl with a high wheelbase, as otherwise her engine would've been flooded and we'd have been stranded. Our luck didn't last much longer, however. We got back onto the Bruce Highway, the main road that links the main cities right up the east coast of Australia, only to find that it was blocked by flood water 20 minutes north of Ingham. It had become impassable due to a river breaking its banks. We were in a queue of cars hoping to get through when the police closed the road and turned us back. A few big trucks tried their luck and made it through but everyone else had to turn round. Half an hour earlier and we might have made it and been on our way. Given that it was the main highway, we didn't expect it to be closed for too long so went to the Ingham tourist information centre to get some advice on what to do while we waited. We were a bit taken aback when, rather than suggesting we spend the afternoon in the cinema as we thought she might say, the woman advised us to get straight back in our van and drive back to Townsville in case the highway closed to the south before we could get out. And, in any case, she said, there's nothing to do here in Ingham anyway!

"It normally rains a lot at this time of the year. But never like this. Don't worry, though, the road never gets blocked for more than two days. It's paradise here the rest of the year!" Over the course of the next few days, we would hear the same refrain countless times from the locals. Little consolation when we were deliberately ahead of schedule and now stranded in a place we had already driven through once without giving it a second look. Didn't look much like paradise to us. Over the course of the next few days we looked in vain at the weather forecast, the local newspaper and the RAC Queensland website for information on the road but the situation was only getting worse. Tropical Cyclone Ellie gave us an extra soaking and the Bruce Highway was now flooded in several places, to the extent that Townsville was cut off by road in all directions. Fortunately we had heeded the advice in Ingham to head back south as it was now not only completely cut off but the high street was under metres of water with hundreds of homes flooded. - so in spite of our own depression at having our exciting adventures put on hold, we realised that we got off relatively lightly compared to some of those poor people in Ingham.

Fortunately Townsville wasn't that bad but it still hadn't stopped raining and there was no end in sight. As we listened to the weather reports on the radio it was somewhat ironic to us that while we were stuck in a cyclone with the rain hammering down on us, the south of Australia was suffering from a heat wave which would later cost so many lives in the tragic forest fires, and other parts of Queensland were in a drought.

Townsville is not a place to be stuck in for more than a few hours let alone for six days. Cabin fever was setting in in the campervan and it was doing nothing for our marriage. Emma got her hair cut and Duncan went to the local aquarium to see all the fish we weren't seeing in the ocean. Until Jenny arrived, the only ray of sunshine had been the local cinema which we visited three times in three days until we had exhausted everything we wanted to watch. Having been on the boat from hell in a storm on the Whitsundays, Jenny and her new travelling mate Emma were just glad to be on dry-ish land again after taking one of the last Greyhound buses that had made it through the floods before the road to the south had been closed to all traffic. We were so glad to see some friendly faces but our general mood of despair probably didn't do much to cheer Jen up as it soon became clear that her plans to head north would also be scuppered by the weather. All wasn't lost though as we spent one evening in a local pub and somehow came second in their quiz which won us a bottle of wine although, as always, one of us couldn't drink because we had to drive the bloody van…

The main problem we had was that we were due to return the van to Cairns but, because the roads were blocked, we obviously couldn't get there to honour our contract with Apollo. At first we couldn't leave the van in Townsville because they don't have a depot there and, if we did, we'd breach the terms of our contract. We looked into driving back to Brisbane and paying a (huge) fee for returning the van to the wrong depot, but even that became redundant when the road south flooded. And we had the small matter of a plane to catch from Cairns to Singapore via Brisbane in a matter of days. The clock was ticking and there didn't seem to be anything we could do other than sit it out and hope the rain would stop. We were beginning to wonder if the fact that the little plane on our wedding travel fund website never made it further than Australia would prove to be an omen.

In the end we decided that we had no other option but to pay an extortionate amount to Apollo to leave the van at our campsite and then pay Qantas some more money to change our flights. But in the end, we were just so glad to be finally leaving Townsville and putting the last week behind us, that it was money well spent. We hadn't expected to see Brisbane again, or to be so relieved to do so, but after so much rain and depression the novelty of seeing the sun again cheered us up at last.