Townsville

Drove around town to get familiar with the place.  I must admit, any town where it's relatively easy to drive and navigate the van makes a great first impression on me.  And although several people had set the bar pretty low for Townsville, I ended up really liking the place.  On my way around town I found "The Esplanade" - a park/garden area that runs for a couple of kms along the foreshore.  It has a "stinger net" for safe swimming, lots of picnic tables and trees for shade, and there is also a swimming lagoon at one end.  The day I arrived there was also a massive market on at one end of The Esplanade, so it was a bit tricky to find a park.   I continued on to find a caravan park relatively close to town, and on the beach (Rowes Bay).

The next day it was into town to visit Reef HQ & Turtle Hospital (it has a much longer name than this, but "Reef HQ" seems to have stuck).  It holds the largest living reef in an aquarium environment in the world, and contains examples of many types of coral and fish speciies.  It also holds numerous shark and ray species, one of which - the Leopard Shark - has been a bit TOO successful at breeding and they've had to separate the boys and girls.  They run a breeding program and provide many other aquariums around Australia and the World with sharks and rays.  This has two benefits - firstly captive raised sharks and rays are used to being around humans and handled so survive better than wild ones, and secondly it prevents the need to catch wild sharks and rays.

Although only small, with the various exhibits and also the talks they gave each hour, I managed to spend about 2 1/2 hrs here.   The first talk was a joint effort between our host in the theatrette and a diver in the aquarium.  A lot of topics were covered, including the distinction between various shark species - those that need to keep swimming in order to breath/survive, versus those that can sit on the bottom such as the Shovel Nosed Shark and thanks to active gills can continue breath. 

The next talk they gave (DVD actually) was about marine stingers.  For most of the presentation I was the only one in the theatre, but given that I was new to the whole "marine stinger" environment, I thought it was worth a watch.   I found out what the vinegar is for - I originally thought it was to help with the pain, but it's not.  When you come in contact with a box jellyfish only about 1/4 of the stingers actually fire, this means that if you attempt to move/remove/rub the stingers while still on the skin there are still about 3/4 of the stingers able to fire - more pain !!!!  So the vinegar simply disables the rest of the stingers (namatasites?), which allows the tentacles to be removed by hand and prevents it from getting worse.  As for the pain caused by those that have already fired - too bad.

The stings of the box jelly fish are the fastest biological mechanism known to man.

The third talk was on the Turtle Hospital.  They didn't originally have one, but so many people were bringing sick and injured turtles in because they had no where else to go, they raised some money and started a hospital.  During the talk, they did a quick demonstation of why we need to prevent rubbish and plastics from entering the sea.   They had something in a glass jar and asked the audience what they thought it was.  It looked just like a jelly fish, but was in fact a plastic bag - it was the ideal demonstation to show how a turtle could easily mistake it for a jelly fish.

After the talk it was out to the Turtle Hospital to see a few of the turtle they had.  One had just come in with "floating disorder" which can be caused by numerous things, but the outcome is still the same - they can't dive to feed so slowly starve, and also can't dive to get out of the way of boats so are more likely to be hit.   He was heading off to get an X-Ray to find out what was wrong.   They also had another Turtle "Sally Sunshine" who was ready for release - and she certainly looked raring to go, racing around her pool and coming up the sides to investigate the people.

After the Turtle Hospital I drove out to one of the shopping centres for a spot of shopping, including getting some mosquito netting for the back of the van.   After that it was back into town and up to a lookout on the top of Castle Hill.  This hill is smack bang in the middle of town and rises straight up (about 250m) from the surrounding area.   The van made it up, although it was back into 1st gear on occassions.

After the lookout it was back to the caravan park, and time to do some washing.

HERE are some more shots from Townsville.