I rode the 'hound down from Cairns to Townsville, arriving at 23.30. It was a great journey - there were at most ten of us on the bus at any one time, they showed a couple of films and it was all very comfortable and spacious. I've had some grim Greyhound journeys: up the West Coast of the US a couple of times, being boarded by immigration agents, for example, but this trip was great.

Townsville is a proper working town, as opposed to Cairns, which feels a bit like it's only there to service the tourism industry. It's not a major stop on the well-trodden East Coast backpacker route, but I like it here - there are interesting museums and some good bars. I visited the Museum of Tropical Queensland and spent a while poring over an exhibition on the Pandora, a ship sent from the UK in 1790 to search for surviving Bounty mutineers on Tahiti. They found 14 mutineers (the rest had left for Pitcairn Island) and locked them up in "Pandora's Box," a cell on the ship, then set sail for England. They ran into the Great Barrier Reef and thirty-five people died when the ship sank. The survivors made it to a sandy cay and eventually sailed over 2000 km to Indonesia in open boats, on tiny rations in the baking sun. It was interesting reading what happened to them when they got home: three of the mutineers were hung but others were acquitted and went on to have illustrious naval careers. Some of the crew ended up perishing at sea in other ships: it was a really tough life in those days! I walked up to the huge rocky lookouts on Castle Hill and spent a happy few hours pottering around the Maritime Museum, looking at the Yongala exhibition and other fascinating displays. I think the docent was pleased that someone was so nerdy and he kept coming over to point out facts and elaborate on stories.