Lucinda & Ingham, Friday 30th July

It's raining! Damn me, it's actually raining. It's not just a brief shower, either, but continues for a couple of hours. Further up the coast, the sun comes out and it's hot again. But we've seen rain!

Weird dreams haunt me. Generally, I'm sleeping OK now, not pacing up and down, vividly awake and ravenously hungry at 4am, as I had been. But weird dreams. Chris is an inveterate late night pacer, though, throughout the trip.

We're up at 8, and Chris & I, in a deranged cholesterol frenzy, produce a magnificent brekkie of eggs, sausage, bacon, fried potatoes and mushrooms. The others chew their fruit and muesli. Lightweights. I maintain that the eating of fruit leads to Weakness And Debility Of The System, and Immoderate Habits.

Fortified and packed, we head on up the road by about 10. There's another 500k or so to do today up the Bruce. Past Proserpine, and we stop for mango ice-cream at the Big Mango, just outside Bowen. It's nice; just wish I'd let it warm up a little first, though. Somehow, we end up not on the Bruce, but on the road that leads through Bowen. A strange town, with its huge piles of salt at the salt works on the edge of town. Back on the right road again, there's about 100k of nothing before we get to Ayr. Nothing, that is, except for Gumlu and Guthalungra, whom I'd swear we left behind in the Mines of Moria. Two little settlements on the roadside; Gumlu has nothing; Guthalungra is (so Mr Google tells me) a railway landmark, has some sort of caravan park, and a shop, which smells, eye-wateringly, of decaying bait. Matters not; they sell cold drinks, and Cadbury's Black Forest Gateau chocolate bars, which I've never seen anywhere else on my travels. Heads reeling from the stink of bait, we carry on about our day.

On the Qld railways website, Guthalungra's list of features runs something like this:
Attractions: n/a
Rostered Hours of Staff Attendance: n/a
Available Car Parks:
Total: unknown
Secure: unknown
Platforms and Destinations: n/a
Telephone Number: unknown
Ticket Vending Machine Code/Number: (not an option on the TVM)
Distance from Central: 1193.340 kilometres
Elevation of Track Above Sea Level: unknown metres
Derivation of the place name: name of an aboriginal

At least they know how far it is from Central...

Townsville's entry in my diary has "shithole" appended in brackets. That's a pretty unfair assessment, but its suburbs do just seem to go on for ever.

James has been complaining of a sore throat for a couple of days; I've had a dry cough and a bit of wheezing too, so we're inclined to blame it on having the A/C on full blast in the car, for 6 hours at a stretch. It's a theory, anyway.

So far today, the countryside has been incredibly arid savannah, but beyond Ayr or Townsville, we're back in sugar cane country again, and we get the occasional waft of sweetness from small town cane mills. It's still dry, though. Until we get to Ingham, and we suddenly notice how astoundingly emerald green and lush everything is. The transformation is abrupt, and striking. The other striking thing is that 60% of the population of Ingham is of Italian descent.

It starts to rain again, and by the time we get to Lucinda, we begin to see why everything's green; damn, but it knows how to rain here. Coming in, we pass the estuaries and creeks, and see the signs for another Mangrove Boardwalk, but the rain's a bit thick for that sort of thing, and we can't face it. Lucinda's a major sugar town, and has a jetty for shipping out sugar which is 5.7 kilometres long, so that in the rain it stretches right out of sight. Driving through the town, especially with the torrential rain, we could easily imagine ourselves in the southern US. That the Lucinda Point Hotel/Motel is a colonial-looking building (OK, so it was pouring with rain, and getting dark...) on a crossroads does nothing to dispel the notion, and as we walk in to the bar, we can almost hear the sound of souls being sold to the Devil by the light of a thunderstorm at midnight, and Robert Johnson banging on about a Hellhound On His Trail.

Notion quickly dispelled, we find ourselves in a rather nice-looking bar and restaurant. They think they've got room to put us up. Good news, yes they have. Bad news, it's in something called "units" out the back. They're about 25 bucks a head, so we say yes. We've been in worse places. Actually, "We've Been In Worse Places" becomes more of a mantra than a statement of fact, as the trip goes along, through frequent repetition. Perhaps "Hail To The Jewel In The Lotus Flower" started life the same way. Whatever, the Challis Lodge still remains something of a nadir.

I digress. The "units" are all-metal cabins around a covered courtyard, with bunk beds, a fridge and TV, and not much else. They must be infernally hot in midsummer; it's bloody hot and humid enough now, in the middle of winter. But, the beds are comfortable, the A/C works, the towels are clean, and the showers hot, and the VB is stowed in the fridge. Grouse, mate. Observing one or two of our fellow guests, we figure out what the units are for - fishermen coming for the renowned fishing round here.

I wander off to the restaurant/bar ahead of the others, and decide to phone Kim at home. Bad move. There's no reception on either of the mobiles I'm carrying, so I ask if the hotel has a payphone. It does; making an international call, however, is quite an art form, and when I succeed, the phone swallows money as fast as I can feed the coins in. It does lighten the load of loose change that's been making me walk lopsided for a couple of days, though, so I end up calling it a win. It's now raining in Biblical proportions outside. At the bar, they assure me it's only drizzle, so light as to be scarcely worth mentioning.

When the others arrive, we head for the restaurant. We've really lucked in today; despite the unpromising units we're sleeping in, the Lucinda Point produces one of the two finest meals we have on the whole trip; it's that good. Main course, beer and wine costs about 30 bucks a head; it's pretty damn good. The girl who serves us, in a fairly striking PVC miniskirt, warns us about the whole Drop Bear / Hoop Snake joke. Hell, we're seasoned travellers; we wouldn't fall for that sort of thing...

Chris, Pete and I stay on for a few drinks in the bar. Then I stay on for a few more. Back at the bunkhouse, there's an exquisite tiny green treefrog perched on one of the light globes in the courtyard. The rain has made the atmosphere incredibly humid, and brought the mosquitos out; I lash on 100% DEET, but they still keep coming and chewing anything that isn't covered in liquid DEET. Nothing for it but more VB, and listen to some Black Cab.

No photographs today! Aiee!