June 6, 2011- Day 40
Where: Townsville
Dinner: Minestrone soup with grilled cheese sandwiches
Today started out on the wrong foot with Pat and I having a conversation that ended with us being annoyed with each other. It's not surprising that after being together for every second of the last 6 weeks that our patience with each other is sometimes lacking, but it's still not a fun way to start the day. We made eggs on toast and then set out walking into town. Townsville isn't too big, but they do have a long sidewalk along the beach called “The Strand.” Sound familiar?! It wasn't as nice as the LA Strand, but it was very tropical looking. We're officially in “tropical north Queensland” now. In fact, we're only 3 hours from Cairns so we had to come up with a plan today of how we're going to spend our final week with the van. We've decided to go west a bit and drive through some of the rainforests up here. We're going to go up past Cairns and then come back down along the coast into Cairns on the 13th when we check into our extended stay share house. At that point we're going to need to get pick up some casual work to make enough money for our SE Asia travels. But that's not the point of today's entry!
Today we spent a couple of hours walking down along the water and it was the first day that we've really experiences humidity. It gets crazy hot and humid up here in the summer, but because it's winter it shouldn't be too bad. It sure didn't feel like my idea of winter! It was probably 80 degrees today. Lovely. We tried to find some Vietnamese food for lunch, but it turns out there isn't any in Townsville. Bummer. We decided on cereal instead, hehe.
We left town and drove a little ways up north where we stopped at a rest stop for the night. We made some grilled cheese and canned soup. I went to go to the bathroom and I was checking out the ceilings because that's what I do now in rest stops. I've seen so many creepy spiders and lizards in them that I get paranoid now. I was noticing how much cleaner this bathroom seemed than some others and then I noticed something rather large up along one of the ceiling beams. It was too big to be a spider and it was round. I realized that it was a frog, like a bright green tropical frog!! I looked around and found that there were 5 other smaller frogs around too. I just had to laugh. This country never ceases to surprise me. At lease tonight's surprise is a cute brightly colored one, and not a horribly scary one that wants to kill me. Or perhaps these frogs are deadly and I just haven't gotten to the page about them in the Lonely Planet yet. Oh my. The joke is that everything in Australia wants to kill you, and after reading all the different signs at the beaches I believe it! At all the beaches they have signs about jelly fish and they even put out vinegar for you to douse your sting with if you get stung. Scary. It's not the dangerous time of year for them, but apparently there could still be some out there. What did I ever do to a jelly fish to deserve this threat?! I don't know about all of this! Did I mention we're also up into crocodile area now? Luckily I went to the Steve Irwin Zoo so I know how to avoid them! Hopefully my knowledge serves me well (fingers crossed!).
Oh yes, and I also got to talk to my mommy tonight so that made me happy :) Don't worry mom, I'll stay away from crocs and if I see a jelly fish I'll kick it in the face. Unfortunately you can't see all of them, but not to worry, I'll figure something out! I'll make an offering to the jelly fish god or something... I'm open to suggestions.
No comments:
Post a Comment