The busride from Townsville to Noosa, departing at 1:30pm Sept 2 and arriving at 10:30am Sept 3, was made a little easier by chatting with Michael, this dude from Switzerland. After recounting my adventures in the backcountry, he regaled me with stories of his antics driving 4x4s in the snow back home. Did you know that in Switzerland it is a criminal offence to have an accident, or even go off the road? A friend of his had plowed into a snowbank, breaking the front headlight. The police had taped together the headlight to identify the make and model of the car, and based on a fleck of paint at the scene, isolated and questioned all the folk in the area with that particular car. Michael added that I should come and visit him and go driving some time....

I was discharged in Noosa, feeling a little spaced out from my all-nite tour of Australia's remote gas stations. This girl on the bus pitched me Koala's Beach Resort, and "even if she did work there, it was cool anyway". Good enough. She had just come off of 3-day 4x4 camping tour of Fraser Island, the world's largest island of sand, and it had pissed rain the entire time. Normally such stuff would not put me off, but it was the first time I thought about not bothering with Fraser, yet another atrocity against the Aussie travel itinerary. I arrived in my dorm, and the first thing that struck me was a wall of BO, followed by seeing a pair of handcuffs on the bunkbed ladder. Irish girls. Ditched my stuff and went to explore Noosa.

Wafts of eucalytus wafts follow you everywhere. I went to a lookout in the National Park, and actually saw kookaburras instead of hearing their maniacal laugh. I was expecting the hyenas from Roger Rabbit I suppose. I took a path into town, and soon could hear jazz music playing in the distance, as it turned out to be the Noosa Heads Jazz Festival. I wandered the main drag, Hastings St., wandering to a couple of patios to check out bands. Hastings is quite boutiquey, lots of bars, little malls, and bikini stores. I got talking to this older guy, Graham, and ended up shutting down the afternoon in the beer tent of The Forest, a park with "The Big Stage". Good weather, great day, but I had to ditch Graham because the temperature was dropping, and I couldn't remember where my hostel was.

Outside of Ravenswood was a descent from the hills to the desert floor, then a 70km drive through the backcountry. I eventually reached the town of Ayr, which I had been considering as my next stop after Townsville. Once I got there, I realized there wasn't much to it, just the one strip. More a town for people spending a month or two picking fruit in the local orchards than a traveller seeking adventure. Cross that off my list. Arriving in Townsville an hour later, I drove around in the rain, stressing a bit about my lack of organization (in favour of spontaneity of course), seemingly finding every route of the city core, and finally located the Reef Lodge, the hostel of hidden cameras.

There, I chatted with my bunkmates Maddie (Melbourne), Michael (Germany), the Dutch coral guy who worked for ReefHQ (local aquarium with worlds largest indoor coral reef), and a sculptor from Darwin who was installing a show just down the street. Michael was heading to Cairns, and I told him about my experiences on the dive boat. Thinking back to the Yongala wreck, I was wondering whether doing those things at the beginning of my trip meant doing the best stuff first followed by a steady denouement. I could hear hear bass booming from the clubs on nearby Flinders St, and had been looking forward to a night on the town while I'd been driving. It was raining though, and kinda chilly, so I spent the night hanging out around the hostel, chatting with two German girls, Alex and Janine. It turns out that a few Germans actually DON'T listen to electronica!!

The next day, I got up, checked email to find the DJ hadn't contacted me. Screw him. Now I had to make a call. I had four days to kill before flying out of Brisbane to Sydney, where I'd be meeting Cousin Norm for our road trip, and was thinking of either Rainbow Beach or Noosa, both nice spots with good surfing. Rainbow? Noosa? Rainbow...... Noosa..... I decided on Noosa Heads, since Maddie had really liked it, and it had a more flexible bus schedule. It meant a 21-hour busride from Townsville, but hey, the weather was miserable, and since I'd be travelling overnight, I didn't have to worry about accomodation right?

I was greeted in Ravenswood by a rundown corrugated metal miners' shack. In the late 1800's, gold was discovered in the Elephine Creek here, and the ensuing boom created Australia's first inland town. By the 1930's, however, richer veins of gold further inland, such as Charters Towers, caused the industry to fade in Ravenswood, and the town was dismantled or simply abandoned. I walked around, checking out the old mine shafts and rusted equipment. A few people actually do still live in and around Ravenswood, so I checked out the buildings, some original, some new but built in the style of. I ate lunch in the Imperial Hotel with a group of cowboy-hatted students from a local agricultural college. Here I learned that the hotel was haunted, a spirit lurking in room 12A. Of course we had to check this out, and since the innkeeper had said we could look where ever we liked, we crept up the creaky stairs and fanned out to located the room. Upon finding it (the rooms were ordered 12, 12A, 14), we burst in to see a figure lying in the bed. Although my first instinct was that it was the ghost (and secretly it remains so), it turns out the the night staff were simply crashed out before their shift. Laughing we took off down the hall. It turns out that the ghost manifests itself as a cold chill and musty scent in the billiard room, or as a legless, capped apparition floating over the bed, adjusting his tie. You can book rooms at the Imperial, and request which room you'd like to stay in....
Afterwards, I jumped into the car, back to the coast and Townsville (for returning the car, and seeing if the party from Maggie was a go).

The view a block from my hotel, along the "croc" river, and road outside of Ravenswood.

When I arrived back in Halifax, I discovered that the little sidestreet with the hotels was in fact the main drag. I checked in at the suitably named Halifax Hotel, run by Jim and Michelle, great folk. The hotel was about 100 years old, ancient in Aussie terms, especially inland. Twenty bucks got me a white-washed panelled room with 12-foot ceilings and double bed, all to myself. There were no locks on the doors, not a problem since the only other guests were a live-in who had been there two years, and a guy from Charters Towers who came here to get away from it all, sit on the veranda, sip his red wine, and read his book uninterrupted. I had a shower to wash away the Getz grime, shaved, and headed to the pub downstairs to see who else was about.
I ended up talking to Cynthia, a woman in her 40's (I'd say) who was of Aboriginal descent. We chatted about the Bush administration and what is was like to live so close to the States, past lives, rooting, how her friends thought she was psychic, overpopulation, and Aboriginal philosophy. Then she asked me if I was interested in the French Revolution. I mean, I did an essay on it in high school, and think of it now and again when I feel powerless against the powers that be in this day and age, but aside from that, not much. She told me that in a past life, I had been a commander in the Revolution, and I had a mate from then who continued to watch over me. "In fact, he's standing here now, just over your right shoulder." I froze, and felt a chill run up my neck. I've heard a lot of crazy stuff before, but when someone tells me there's a ghost right next to me.... We chatted a bit more, but once she got a bit more toasted and switched back to the topic of rooting, I disentangled myself from the conversation before it got weirder.

I liked the atmosphere here in Halifax, quiet, out of the way, and thus decided to scrap my mission to Mission Beach all together and stay here for a couple more days, sitting on the veranda, sipping beer, and writing in my journal uninterrupted. I learned from some locals that there were crocs in the river around the corner from the hotel, and after a hike and a peek (I paid attention as to how to spot them too, no need to end up the subject of an "ignorant tourist" news item), but I guess the crocs were shy. I was also stressing a bit about not hearing from the DJ on Maggie, as he had been the reason I was killing time around Townsville in the first place.

I left Halifax on the 1st of September, saying ciao to Jim, Michelle, and Charters Towers guy, and headed off to Ravenswood, an abandoned mining town I'd read about. It took me about an hour to drive back to Townsville, where I found the turnoff to the Flinders Highway, and headed further inland into the scrub and heat. With absolutely no traffic aside from myself, and a speed limit of 110, it felt great just to drive.