Townsville wasn’t my usual type of place to visit as a digital nomad. For one, the time zone is terrible for catching meetings US time, as it’s pretty inescapably the middle of the night. The other reason is that I wasn’t there as a tourist so much as an athlete, for the Multisport World Championships (duathlon).
The first thing you inevitably realize when going to Townsville is just how big Australia is. Nearest big city to the south, Brisbane, is effectively two days drive away. To the north, Cairns (pronounced ‘Cans’), is something like 6 hours away. This also means you get to add more time to your flight, mine ended up being four flight legs and some 38 hours (Minneapolis to Phoenix, Phoenix to LA, LA to Brisbane, Brisbane to Townsville).
Townsville sells itself as the effective capital of North Queensland, so the biggest city in the upper half the north east part of Australia, and it did seem to have a decently busy schedule of events and sporting events as a result. It’s also a relatively popular tourist destination with other Australians from further south who come up there in their winter for a bit of warmth.
Why come to Townsville? I can think of two main reasons. The first is if you are visiting Australia in local winter (June-August), it is still nice and warm there, unlike the bigger cities to the South (conversely I hear summer there can get miserable). The second reason is that Townsville has a nice “all in one” Australian package: you get to see kangaroos and koalas, you can drive into the Outback on a day trip, you can lay on a beautiful beach, and you can take a boat cruise out to the Great Barrier Reef. If you wanted to add a taste of Australia to another trip, such as to New Zealand, Townsville would actually be a pretty good choice for that, spend five days or so.
Well, a third reason as I learned is that the Australian working holiday visa (which has an annoying agricultural/rural area requirement for renewal) counts Townsville as rural, and it’s one of the biggest cities to get into that category. Although gossip from local backpackers was that finding the short term jobs there isn’t so easy.
Let’s start with Townsville city itself. The city is really built along two lines. Running along the Ocean is the Strand. This is a really nicely built walkway and beautiful beach lined with a wide selection of restaurants and most of the major hotels. It really enjoyed the atmosphere there and I think most people would enjoy staying along there. A second axis runs inland from the south end of the Strand, the main harbor and marine, along Flinder St, and has the business district, the stadiums, and event centers. This axis has a number of faded commercial areas that give somewhat gloomy vibes, so it is more a practical than the a pretty place to stay, unlike the Strand.
I myself stayed down this second axis at an Airbnb at the backside of Castle Hill. Castle Hill is a nice hike and viewpoint that dominates the city, which local legend has it, is just 1 meter short of being a mountain. Townsville locals talk like their city is big (they talk about neighborhoods as if they were distant suburbs), but from where I was I could walk (5 km or so max) to pretty much everything of interest in the city.
The second axis is also the home of the Ross River. It doesn’t really draw attention like rivers in many cities. Perhaps because it has a few crocodiles, and the estuarine crocodiles can be dangerous. It is also the namesake of the Ross River virus, an unpleasant disease. Thankfully there weren’t many mosquitoes around when I was there. They don’t feature these facts in the tourist displays, for some reason.
With the Strand as one side of a triangle, the Ross River axis as the bottom, and the airpot as a third side, you effectively have a triangle with Castle Hill at the center, and this is the heart of Townsville.
Perhaps the most famous tourist destination around Townsville is Magnetic Island, which in the Australia fashion of shortening everything, is called “Maggie Island” by most locals. It’s a pretty island with a frequent ferry connection to the mainland. It’s got a bus that connects a few bays with hotels and beaches. Scattered around the island are reefs and shipwrecks that make for good snorkeling. The biggest draw is the Forts Walk. This is a hike up to the old World War II coastal defense battery, which also happens to be the best place to see koalas in the wild. For me, there were a couple in the trees behind the old AWACS latrine, and another in a tree right next to the range finder mount, and a fifth just at the start of the hike down into Florence Bay. There were probably more I didn’t see, they can be hard to see from some angles.
The reefs of Magnetic Island are part of the Great Barrier Reef National Park but the “Barrier” reef itself is quite far out from shore. I took a cruise with a company called Adrenalin that took the two hour boat ride out to the John Brewer reef and Museum of Underwater Art (just a few statues in the water really). Saw some sharks, lots of parrot fish and angel fish, giant clams, snails, and a couple of anemones with anemone fish (‘Nemo’ fish). A pair of humpback whales came in not long after we got out of the water and looked great, but made us all regret getting out of the water because they came right up to the edge of the reef where we had just been (we had actually been able to hear them underwater earlier). I can’t say if this is the best possible reef experience, but I feel it was well worth the motion sickness pills I took for the bumpy ride out there.
For inshore nature, the Billabong Sanctuary is a small zoo dedicated to local fauna. Great place to make you properly scared of crocodiles, to see an essentially invisible creature launch itself out of the water during the feeding. You can pose with the kangaroos, but you can also just see kangaroos alongside the road here. It’s nothing like the mega zoos of big cities, but I think it was worth the stop.
My one day trip out was to visit Ravenswood. Ravenswood is basically a ghost town that hasn’t given up the ghost yet, because there is a large active gold mine still there that helps keep up the old hotels, post, and courthouse. It’s not much to look at but I am quite glad I visited. It felt more authentic than most places like that I have been before. Unfortunately the viewing platform for the modern gold mine is currently closed. Perhaps my favorite part of the stop was a short bike ride down a gravel road into a beautiful empty valley to the east that said Outback to me, “yep, there’s a lot of nothing out here” which is a feeling you can’t get in most other places in the world. It reminded me of the edges of the Blue Mountains I visited near Sydney on my last trip and really enjoyed. I ran out of time to visit Charter Towers but I believe it would is a bit bigger parallel to Ravenswood: old Outback gold mining town. I had been concerned that the area near Townsville wouldn’t offer much true Outback, but the locals assured me that basically everything inland of Townsville was indeed Outback. Head to Mount Isa if you want a city that’s really out there at the edge.
Something I didn’t do but I would definitely have done if I had another free day, would have been to drive to a hike near Mount Halifax and to see Wallaman Falls. North to Cairns, Port Douglas, and Daintree Rain Forest, might also be worth a visit, those are the cities considered the most direct to the Great Barrier Reef.
Local traditional food is locally caught fish and chips, meat pies, and pub faire served at old hotels (the Commonwealth got mentioned in a few places I saw as a good example). Prawn (shrimp) appetizers were pretty common. Juliette’s gelato cafe is well worth a stop or three. This is not a culinary capital by any means, but the places I stopped were all good enough.
One thing that caught my eye were the huge fruit bats you can see flying at twilight and dawn.
There were a handful of tourists everywhere around Townsville, but not enough to give excessive tourism vibes, especially since most of them were internal Australian tourists, which was not at all my experience with Sydney, which was packed full of tourists when I was there.
Australia is a nice country, and perhaps one of the easiest countries to visit culturally (while it has plenty of differences and uniqueness, the culture is still effectively parallel with American culture). But the long and expensive flight and major shift in time zone, plus the massive distances you have to cover there, make it hard to recommend. It didn’t steal my heart like New Zealand, and I recommend something like an Australian appetizer paired with a New Zealand main course for a trip. And as an appetizer, Townsville, possibly paired with a few days in Sydney and the Blue Mountains, would do pretty well.
