Pictures from Townsville

Actually, its not pictures from Townsville, but sent from Townsville. I found an unsecured WLAN accesspoint in our local backpacker, which I am using now shamelessly. Connection is really bad, though, I am waving the PDA all over the room to get a connection quality of 4-6% (60-80% is normal). Well, at least its for free, so here are the first pics from our tour:

This picture is from Narita airport in Tokyo. There was not much to do except sleeping or watching Sumo wrestling on airport TV, which the locals happily did. I watched them watching it, which was quite interesting ;)

Thats our plane being loaded in Tokyo. Interesting fact: the workers that load your plane at the airport line up next to the plane later, as it rolls to the runway, wave to the passengers and finally bow into the direction of the aircraft and to each other. Nice working spirit, don't you think?

This is one of the pictures from Brisbane. You see lots of these older buildings made from sandstone in front of the newer skyscrapers. Very interesting architectural contrasts in this city.

Part of the skyline of Brisbane with the Brisbane river in front

Huge bridge in Brisbane spanning the Brisbane river. This is one of the first pictures we made, just after our arrival in the morning. There were lots of joggers on the boardwalk next to the river - looking much healthier than we did after being awake for almost 30 hours.

A small island/peninsula located in the Cape Hillsborough National Park in the vicinity of the town of Mackay. The picture was made during the beginning of low tide. During high tide, the peninsula is actually an island, but during low tide, you can walk over to it. You gotta be fast, though, as there are two high and low-tides each day and unless you dont want to have the true 'Gilligan'-experience, you should keep an eye on the water-level.

This picture is also from Cape Hillsborough National Park. There was a 'controlled' wildfire on the other side of the park (rangers frequently burn parts of the bush, as the dry biomass on the ground becomes too dense, so that possibly more devastating wildfires are prevented). It looked a bit scary though, as the flames finally covered a huge part of the mountainside, down to the road, we later drove on. In fact, it is sometimes these controlled wildfires, that lead to real wildfires, so we had to keep not only an eye on the tide, but also the flames as well. While the flames rose higher, there was a helicopter landing on the beach that took some newsstation people onboard, who obviously covered the fire in their broadcast.

Same scene, different time.

This picture was made on Whitehaven Beach, which is located on the Whitsunday islands - a small group of islands that belong to the inner Great Barrier Reef (next coastal town is Airlie Beach). We did a daytrip here with the boat you see in the center of the picture. First, we had about an hour of snorkeling action near one of the uninhabited smaller islands, during which we saw zillions of colorful corals and fishes. The fishes are all but shy and come really close to you, so we got a good look at them. Sadly we forgot our waterproof camera case, so there are no underwater pictures from that day, but we will definitely take it out to the reef during our next reeftour from Cairns. The beach on the picture is one of the most perfect beaches I have ever seen. The water is absolutely translucent and the sand is of the finest white grain - we were even told that it is used for the cleaning of jewellery. Much different to the coastal beaches, who are also very clean and have good sand, but this one was simply perfect.

Kangaroo party near Yeppoon.