Townsville

New Years Day, 2019

Townsville is only a short hop from Cairns.  Probably a couple hundred kms.

This is a shot of the weather as we were leaving Cairns last night. Sometime you luck out with the weather and other times you don't.

Townsville seems like a nice little place but when you're cruising and you only stop for part of the day you really can't see too much so it's hard to tell if you'd like to come back.

It's definitely an industrial town as all the pics below would indicate...lots of storage, material handling and loading equipment.

So today the excursion choices were not that great and we opted for the Townsville & Billabong Sanctuary Tour.

Basically a drive through town and then a visit to an animal "sanctuary"...not a zoo!

Just a bunch of animal pics then...

If you wanted you could handle some of the critters shown below..the snake and the tiny croc... these are not activities we choose to participate in.

Maybe it's not that harmful to the animals but who knows?  It may add a considerable amount of stress to their already shitty captive lives.

This guy you really had to hold onto strongly or he would bite you.  He looks pissed off doesn't he?

A white cockatoo...

and a black one...

The koalas were cute..and again people were allowed to handle these guys.

And some sort of a hawk I guess.

And a sleepy kangaroo

A wombat.  I'd never seen one of these buggers before.

And some black and white geese.  Very tame. The walked amongst us and tried to bite our toes.

Here's a short movie about ducks and turtles living together in harmony

On the way back to the ship we went up to the highest point in town to get some pics.

And the Townsville cemetery...great stuff!

That's pretty much it for Townsville, Australia.