Okay, something had to go wrong at some point I guess, it was all going was too smoothly. It wasn't what I expected though - I thought the complicated flights yesterday would be my undoing but instead it was the next morning when the dive tour pickup van arrived to pick up a couple of people...and not me. I wasn't on the list, they hadn't heard of me. Bemused, I showed the van guy my internet receipt but he still shook his head and denied me entry to his bus, so I had to slink away back to my room, annoyed and not a little peeved that I had to get up at 5am to learn all this. My theory is that I should have rang yesterday to reconfirm. They didn't say it in the trip notes but it's something I did with The Spirit trip and it would have been a perfect time for me to drop off peoples official lists. It's a pain though because I couldn't have rung them really because I was in transit most of the time yesterday. I also really wanted to do the Yongala as well. Oh well, a further excuse to have to come back to Oz, and I'll just have to wait until I get back home to see if they charged me or not for what I thought I was booked on but didn't get to go to. I just knew something was going to go wrong in Townsville...

So. Well. Having been turned so shamefacedly away from the dive tour, that left me with a day in Townsville to kill. I wandered round all the (shut) shops and eventually cheered myself up with eggs benedict and a breakfast lager at 9am in the first cafe that opened, and I studied my Lonely Planet Guide for entertainment suggestions. It told me that (among other things to do) there was a big Aquarium in Townsville with a part model of the Yongala in it (so at least I could see fishes somehow) and next door was an iMax Dome - like a regular iMax only the screen is dome shaped over your head and the film is specially distorted to create the illusion of wrap aroundnessness. That sounded like a reasonable way to pass the time, so I walked on over.

iMax dome - not convinced. The dome screen itself was quite impressive and as you sat in the middle, the area of projection completely wrapped round your field of view. It looked to be made of individual curved square panels and kind of resembled an inverted Zepplin. The place was completely empty though apart from me and some guy who looked like he's slept there overnight, and so it was that the film itself was the usual iMax fare, i.e. a very pretty looking film about the ocean that was without any sort of educational substance - but it wasn't dark enough so you could see the dome panels behind the projection and it ruined the illusion. Or perhaps I was just feeling grumpy about the diving and being unfair...

Next: Reef HQ - it reminded me a great deal of the big aquarium in the Wirral (The Blue Planet) because it also has a great big long tube that you walk through while fish swim over your head. They weren't kidding about it having a model of the Yongala in it though - all along one side of said tube walkway was a fake sunken ship off which all sorts of coral and seaweed was stuck and various fish were swimming around. It was a massive tank, at least the size of your average open plan office environment, and superbely laid out with an Authetic Wave Making Machine (tm) that pushed water convincingly round all the environments and kept everything ticking along.

I had my first scuba nerd moments though. First off, round every corner I was seeing things and thinking 'I've seen that on a dive!'. Also though, the walkway and many other areas of the large tank were meant to recreate various particular areas of the great barrier reef including things you find on the sides of bommies, what you find in reef lagoons etc etc and in each case I recognised the general environment and thought 'I've swum through that!' but then noticed that some of the fish patterns were wrong and certain things were swimming in a way that I never saw them do when I was scubaing (or more to the point, they were just swimming around randomly instead of shoaling or hunting like they were meant to). That suddenly made me realise that aquariums, just like zoos, can be very very good but they are still artificial environments and the occupants can tell...even the fish. That it was affecting things as subtle as shoaling and swimming patterns shocked me however (chiefly because I thought fish were dumber than that). Some things were pretty obvious though like the parrot fish that was swimming round and round and round one window of the tank ceaselessly like one of those caged lions you used to see in poorly run zoos that just paced from one end of the cage to the other all day or rocked from side to side endlessly. There was also the turtle that was endlessly swimming from the bottom of the tank to a corner just above one tank window and back again - they don't do stuff like that in the wild. Perhaps fish don't have 30second memories after all. Or perhaps as soon as you've seen anything out in the wild, be it fish or beast, seeing it in captivity becomes a disturbing experience. Either way, the aquarium was very high quality but it didn't 'alf make me think.

One exhibit particulalry wowed me though, the glow in the dark fish. You see plenty of these programs about deep sea life and they usually wheel out those fish with bioluminescent patches under their eyes so they look, in the pitch black, like a couple of headlamps floating around. This exhibit was in a pitch black room and it was a tank of them! Me and all the kids in the room simultaneously went wild and pressed out noses against the tank. They got dragged off by their Mum's though whereas I could hang around until my eyes got used to the dark, and slowly I could discern the sandy bottom of the tank and then the sillouette of the fish that were moving around. There were even two types of fish in there - one with slightly duller and smaller headlamps that I had assumed earlier was an old or sick fish. It was dead good.

...Because I had got up so bloody early cos of that stupid dive trip, I had now already done one aquarium and one cinema trip and it was still only lunchtime. I couldn't be arsed going to a cafe, and stopped in a McDonald's instead and had a 'McOz' which is more or less your standard quarter pounder only - very bizarrely - with a huge slice of beetroot instead of gerkin (!). Then I found myself somehow at the ferry terminal to Magnetic Island (aka 'Maggie') and sort of...drifted onto it, without any serious purpose to go but also without any serious purpose to be anywhere else either.

The ferry ride is just 25 minutes and many residents of Townsville commute to Maggie and vice versa, indeed I could see it from my hotel balcony and its in spitting distance of the city. The ferry itself is a smallish seacat style thing, and the ferry terminal is a quiet domestic affair. When we disembarked, we quickly split down into our two main constituents namely the people who milled about like they were lost (tourists) and the people who immediately started marching purposefully in some random direction (locals). I was feeling playful so I followed the locals, and ended up in the short stay carpark near the only (as I later discovered) open supermarket on that half of the island. Amused, I looked for beer but found none and settled for bundaberg gingerbeer instead. Bundaberg is a big name in Oz, chiefly for its rum&cola mix in a can which I think is disgusting but lots of people drink it. I didn't know it did other stuff though. Perhaps it's an Aussie Schweps.

Anyhoo, I'd found a free map of the island at the ferry station and used it to navigate myself to the nearest beach,,just a short stroll from the ferry terminal. It was lovely too - deserted just like the rest of Townsville - and I walked the length of the palm fringed beach barefoot at the edges of the foamy blue waves with barely another soul in sight.

I like looking at things that get washed up. Around most of this area, bits of dead reef are two a penny and if you keep your eye out you can pick up lovely textured bits of bleached white coral - indeed I've already got a bag full. But on this particular beach I saw loads of cuttlefish bones, most odd. I didn't know there were that many alive, let alone so many to have one washed up every foot or so on the beach. I collected a bunch and arranged them in a sun-like pattern on the beach, just to confuse passers by. Didn't keep any though, I think they'd get crushed on the way back home.

I wandered up the beach until a rocky promontary and a backpacker hostel stopped my progress, and then turned round and walked back in the opposite direction. I didn't notice on the way there but I certainly noticed on the way back that a couple of said backpacker prats were buzzing up and down the esplanade mindlessly on a bright pink moke trying to express their manhood by wolf whistling all the women they past whilst dangling out of said vehicle and gesturing. A moke seems to be the local island transport - its basically a golfcart and it just about does the island max speed of 60km, you can hire them from Nelly bay (the township nearest the ferry terminal). It certainly beats walking the 10km to the other end of the island, but no matter how much you posture and whistle, there is no way any bloke can avoid looking gay while zipping down the road in a barbie pink golf cart. Consequently I met their exuberant calls with a cheerful and knowing wave.

I arrived a bit early back at the terminal so I went and stood next to a family who were feeding the fish off the marina. A huge shoal of various tropical reef fish had gathered and they were doing their best impression of a school of pirana by reducing a salad sandwich to a skeliton in less than a minute. They were a bit flummoxed by the orange though, and kicked it around like a football - they were still trying to work out what to do when we were called back on the ferry and it's probably still out there, now out to sea.

Got back to my hotel in time for sunset from my balcony and a beer from the local bottle shop, and then I treated my self to an Aussie Stockyard Steak from the restaurant and a nice hot *bath* (because most of these places just have showers these days and a bath is somewhat of a luxury). Conked out a 9pm again. God, jetlag isn't the thing you should worry about here, it's the whole up at sunrise, bed at sunset thing. I'm completely confused, wanting beer at breakfast and breakfast at supper - gah.

I'm getting a hire car tomorrow and driving down to Eungella - an ancient mountain rainforest rife with platypuses and I'm not leaving until I've spotted one! It's a big 4x4 again too hee hee hee (maniacal laughter)