"Why? Is it rough?" I enquired.

"Well let's just say boys will be boys." Welcome to Townsville. The portly man at the Globetrotters hostel took our money and slipped back out the back. He must have been with Jack, Daniel, Tia and Maria for most of the afternoon. He smelt like the Bundaberg distillery. The bloodshot look in his eyes clearly demonstrated that at 6pm he was in the advanced stages of his weekend drinking. His wife seemed to take it all in her stride, this was probably a daily routine that she she accepted rather than fought. 'Under friendly ownership' read the sign on the way in. But surely these weren't the owners?

We put our bags down on the nearest table and wooden seating area adjacent to the stairs. A minute to relax and to gain our bearings. "Where yous guys from?". A half-slurred half-Australian accent came from the next table.

"England." we replied.

"Ah yeah, went to England when I was twenty five, Oxford I think." He was a weathered and bearded man of fiftyish, still trapped with the hippy movement of years gone by. "I don't smoke tobacco," he added. "I smoke pure cannabis.". A long dark pipe was attached to his face and seemed as much of a fixture as his nose or ears. His eyes had trouble focusing on the most simple things. If he had trouble fixing his eyes on his matches on the table it was amazing that he had spotted us. When he turned around to retrieve some skins from his bag he realised that the three men sitting on the table with him had vanished. "Where did they go?" he muttered. We were his next prey.

To be polite, Fred asked where he was from. The reply was as muddled as his beard: "I've got two existing fines to pay for smoking this stuff in public." The answer proved how badly his brain had become disconnected from his mind. We lasted ten minutes and and made the standard excuse for getting out of uncomfortable situations: "We're just going for something to eat."

Wondering around Townsville confirmed what others had said about it. It was Friday night and the place was uncomfortably quiet for a city. There was a scattering of backpackers dominated by men in black trousers and shirts. The streets were American in style with drive-in bottle shops, drive-in motels, drive-in tyres and other large pink shop fronts like 'drive-in me-mad'. There was a competition for which establishment could have the most garish advertising boardings. John's Knob Shop won my prize. The local pubs were, certainly, local. As you walked past, the occupants caught a glimpse of you. The music was bad. I felt like walking in there just so the music would stop. The confusing part about this place was it could be so uncomfortable and ugly one minute and pleasant and enjoyable the next.

One dark deserted road one minute, one overflowing outdoor happy restaurant the next. We did go out to the country country on Jack, Daniel, Tia and Maria's friend's advice. We did make it back. In the celebration that followed we decided not to risk it one more night and left the next day.

Gilligan's, built in November 2003, was the new funky hostel that pretended to be more like a funky hotel. The reception was lined with television monitors. The reception was space age in design. The lifts 'pinged' and a softly spoken female voice kindly told you that she was going down. She even told you when you got to first, second and third base. Why can't it always be like that? In it's attempts to be just like a hotel it also adopted a 2pm check-in time, and insisted on manning this 500 bed venue with just two members of staff. There was a half-hour check-in process that involved filling in a registration form and then signing three separate pieces of paper each of which contained just three words. For all I know I could be have been signing up for for three nude skydiving packages but by that point I wouldn't have cared. This hostel was like going out with a beautiful woman. It had little personality, was expensive, you waited for ages for it to be ready, but it felt nice to be around and it always made out that if you didn't want to be there then there was a large queue of people more than willing to take your place the next night. And -- just like going out with a beautiful woman -- you put all these things to one side and paid for another night. Of course these conclusions were based on what my friends had said after they went out with the beautiful women.

In the room we met Hans, a typical blond-haired blue-eyed German. His English was good but not perfect but he had the amazing ability to be blunt. This was not somebody that was afraid to get to the point. "She is like a pig, her face is crocked and I detest her." We'd only asked what our fellow roommate was like, we weren’t divorce lawyers. "This place smells, I demand to be moved!" he added.

And what did he think of Cairns? "It is boring, it does not amuse me." Had he been out, we countered. "Yes," he defended. "Down the road.". He was quite upset that his trusty alarm clock had failed to wake him that morning causing him to miss his bus. How inefficient. "Can you make this thing work?" he enquired. When we tried to explain that we were not that efficient in electronics I thought he was going to demand to see our papers. He did'nt.

Cairns is the capital of the north. Sydney is the capital of the south. That's where the similarity ends between these two cities. In 1934 Rocky -- a huge asteroid two kilometres in diameter -- plummeted from space and devastated large parts of Cairns. OK, it didn't. But it might as well have done. It was as if some overweight person had sat on the city causing the sides to squelch out from the centre. The buildings were as low as the buildings in Sydney were high. Cairns seemed to unable to fill itself with people and cars. You could quite happily walk along the main streets and not encounter a single person or car. You could walk from one end to another and not know where you were going to or coming from. All the streets were the same. Same width, same shops, same trees, same pavement. You could walk for miles without finding the centre of town. That's if there was acutally a centre. We hadn't been convinced yet.

A few miles north of Cairns is Kuranda. The clientèle didn't do a great deal to remove the tourist tag that this town had acquired over the years. Middle-aged couples and their children paraded the market stools laden with bags. Japanese tourists blocked off large sections of the pavement doing what Japanese tourists do best in the street: standing still and doing absolutely nothing. The elderly couples were busy purchasing the best Australian gifts for their beloved back home. The tacky gifts were on a par with the bright red inflatable London bus, the flaking fake silver Eiffel Tower keyring and the I ♥ USA T-shirt. I have never seen an inflatable red bus on anyone's mantelpiece, neither have I seen the flaking tower jiggling on anyone's keyring. I have also never seen an American wearing an I ♥ USA top; well maybe I have. These were the sort of gifts that you saw only ten days of the year. The ten days when your parents visited.

So… I rushed straight in and bought one snake-skin purse (100 percent real, of course!), two kangaroo-skin rugs and a boomerang that will never be used simply because they don't work. The Aboriginal statue was a must. Like most such statues you would never put it in your own living room but that wasn't the point. As I was handing over the A$300 I paused for a moment to think about the kangaroo I had stroked and that had consumed 85¢ worth of nuts and grain from my Feed the Animals bag at the Billabong Sanctuary. What a waste. I then started to feel guilty. That kangaroo and I had been friends. He had licked my hand. I had tickled his belly. He had hopped away in happiness. I was feeling really bad. I mean there were plenty of dead kangaroos on the roadside that were fresher and a great deal cheaper than the $100 I had just paid. And now the kangaroo rug would be sitting proudly on my parents' lounge floor. For ten days of the year of course.