Continuing South

I took the ferry back to Townsville, and was going to get a bus ticket to Mackay, but there are only 2 busses a day, and I missed the last one by hours. So I headed toward the highway to hitch-hike, but half way there I realized that I left my water bottle at the bus station, so I had to walk back and get it. I didn't have enough time to go all the way back to the highway before it got dark, so I figured I'd stay in Townsville another night.

Now, I never really feel justified in paying to sleep, it never makes much sence to me. So insteadof checking into a hostle, I decided to sleep on top of nearby Castle Hill, a giant cliff in the middle of townsville. I've already learned that nobody likes to walk in Australia, so I'd have the whole place to myself, and it would be a great sunrise in the morning. It was already dark when I started, which was perfect because hiking at night is much less hot (still hot though).

When I got to the top, the weather started getting cloudy. This was incredible, because the top of Castle Hill was at the same level as the cloud ceiling (which is the flat bottom part of the clouds). The whole area for 10 miles around had little clouds blowing around, and I was looking right along the bottoms of all of them. Occasionally they would blow right through me, or just twenty feet away right.

Due to the clouds, there was no sunrise, but it was a good view nonetheless.

In the morning I caught a ride to Mackay on a giant Truck-Trailer. The driver was quite a character. He had tattoos on both forearms, a quarter of an inch of grey hair on his chin, and none on his head. He cussed at the ignorance of all the other drivers. Even though we were in the most massive vehicle on the road, he drove it like a sports car, aggressively shifting gears and passing most of the other traffic, cussing. Did I mention that he swore a lot? He would drum on his steering wheel to the teeny-bopper techno CD he had cranked to number 11. This guy loved his job.

The cargo he was hauling was an engine the size of a hummer. I helped him deliver it to a tractor yard that specialized in very large tractors. These were the most impressively enormous machines I've ever seen. There were tractors the size of houses half assembled and scattered all over the field. I didn't want to seem like a tourist, so I just acted like I knew what I was doing, helped out where I could and didn't take any pictures.