Running the final errands around Townsville, getting everything set for the trip to Cape York, and visiting a couple of botanical gardens and museums in town... or trying to. Townsville is kinda... sad.
There was just a short list of things on the agenda today: visit two of the botanical gardens in town, and pick up some final things like extra brake fluid and cheese (which does not make a yummy sandwich.)
The first gardens we went to, the Palmetum, is a bit out of town, and was a Bicentennial project from the mid 1980's... and it was very good, better than expected. Some people fuss over palms... and normally I just don't like all that fuss that goes along with palms (or roses or orchids or Harley Davidsons or Macintoshes)... but that doesn't mean that I don't find them interesting. This garden had two major sections for arid zone palms and rainforest palms. There were some good ones, like Chris' favorite Bismarkia nobilis, a bluish-green fan palm with huge 3m wide leaves. There was the very widely planted triangle palm Neodypsis that I see everywhere around Townsville, plus a strange palm from India that has a flat trunk, with the palm leaves coming off the left and right edges.
Curiously, the Palmetum is right next to the Ross River. I wonder if this is where Ross River fever comes from.
Before we got to the second garden, we passed our fourth 'stupid' accident, where someone made a right hand turn into oncoming traffic on Ross River Road in a suburban setting. It's been quite awhile since we've seen an accident--seven weeks! (The last accident was on the onramp to the CityLink motorway in Melbourne.)
The second garden was a disappointment This was the gardens in Anderson park, developed in the late 1950's. That should tell you something. It's a drive through garden! Loopy one way roads meander through it, with parking lots here and there for you to get out--there are no walking trails, just plenty of lawns with a garden bed here and there. This garden supposedly had a Cape York section, but we couldn't find any decent signage or guide. In contrast to the Palmetum, which was extremely well signed with a great interpretation center, most signs were missing from the plants. Strange to think that both are run by the same city department. We didn't spend more than fifteen minutes there. It was very disappointing.
After a quasi-decent bite at Red Rooster (verdict: nothing special), we then dropped in the new Museum of Tropical Queensland, now two years old. The main exhibit are artifacts from the HMS Pandora, wrecked off the north Queensland coast after being sent to track down the Bounty and the Bounty mutineers. I enjoyed seeing Pandora's Box, the small hold where they packed in a dozen or so of the mutineers in leg and wrist irons for five months. Upstairs there were a few exhibits about life in the tropics, a good sized coral exhibit, some odd deep sea specimens, taken up from 400m to 1500m below the surface, and a section on immigration to North Queensland, which I found interesting: first off, there was the belief that 'white' people couldn't acclimatize to the tropics, so Pacific Islanders were brought in as manual laborers for the can fields. Also, the pearling industry, where primarily Chinese and Japanese people worked, weren't really after pearls at all--they were more interested in the shells, which were made into buttons. The pearls were just a nice extra.
Next door to the Museum of Tropical Queensland was Reef HQ, supposedly one of the best aquariums in the world, with live coral and reef life. And it was 'closed for refurbishment until July'. Uh huh. Hm. The adjoining IMAX was also closed, though it had closed on October 7th 2001.
That was kind of my impression of Townsville--half closed. We stayed at the Holiday Inn on the Flinders St Mall, where most of the shops were vacant, or holding 'going out of business' sales. (One of the stores was running TV adverts saying 'nothing over $10. Get your bras and panties. We really don't want stay open longer than we have to.') Most of the business was at the Big W and Kmart stores out in the suburbs. Townsville was really the first Australian city that felt like a mid-sized older American city.
After our errands, we met up with the rest of the tour group. Surprise--they're all older than us! Well, all but one couple. After a brief intro, we headed over to Tim's at the north end of The Strand, and had some of the best seafood I've had yet in Australia. And even better, it was a $25 all you can eat buffet! I must've had 2 dozen oysters... Chris really enjoyed the mud crabs. Mmmm...