I woke, packed up the van and headed south to the first picnic spot I could find. Here I parked up again and prepared breakfast: sausage sandwiches and HP sauce. Yummy. It was stinking hot and not even 9am when I put all the food stuff away and headed south. I’d have preferred to have [...]

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I walked up to Apollo’s office early doors to collect the camper van. After filling in a gazillion bits of paperwork and watching a DVD on its operation, I was handed the keys and sent on my way. There were various provisos: I couldn’t take it off unsealed road except to get to campsites and [...]

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One big issue with Townsville – the public buses run fairly small routes and virtually none run at all on a Sunday. This means I had a hell of a walk out to the edge of town towards the highway and Cairns. An hour took me to a McDonald’s a few kilometres out where I [...]

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I am now sat in McDonald’s in Cairns as it has free wifi. They’ve had a lot of business out of me in Oz since they rolled this out across every branch. However, the reason I’m posting is that I’ve finished hitching all the way from Adelaide to Cairns (with brief uses of public transport [...]

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The train pulled into the new Townsville station at around 10:15. In case you’re using an old map, this is about 500m further out of the town to the west than the “proper” station. While walking into the city, I passed the old station which looks like a traditional British one. Fairly recently, I think, [...]

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OK, I don’t have wireless but I’m typing this up as the Inlander service approaches Townsville. The 21-ish hour journey has gone fairly quickly, partly as I didn’t sleep a lot the night before I set off so I snoozed a bit in the early evening. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the [...]

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After quite a chill-out, some relaxing, a lot of doing not very much and more kicking back than I think is normal… it comes time to leave Mt Isa. Last night we drove up to the city lookout and ate chips. Talia and Ben also took me out to the lake, 15km or so from [...]

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Ok, I did it. I just booked a flight from Darwin to Cairns and another from Cairns to Narita International Airport in Tokyo! After wanting to do so for more years than I care to remember, I am finally going to Japan! A actually have tingles and goosebumps at the thought of it! Part of [...]

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I was woken at 8:20am by Talia ringing me and telling me to get downstairs. I gathered some basics and met her and Ben in the car park. The plan for the day was to grab a McDonalds, then pack some snacks and drive out of town for some beer, swimming and picnic. This we [...]

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I ate well on the flight over. As Qantas isn’t a budget airline, pretty much all flights have a free meal and i was actually given two as they had spare on board. Only a chicken salad sandwich, but they were good enough. I spent the flight reading and doing the crossword in the in-flight [...]

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