Meeting People
Tuesday, June 21st, 2005Last days were all about meetings.
We had an excellent party after the Whitsundays sail. We drank a lot, danced a lot, eaten a lot of Pizza (two plates just for five people - us three Israelies, Sylva the french and his girlfriend, Anuk of Finland), and generally made fun. We had to return at midnight when the last taxci to our guesthouse left - but then it didn’t arrive so we just walked some 4.5k”m from the club to our room at the middle of the night.
The following morning we drove to Townsville. At the middle we stopped at Bowen, to see the “Big Mango”.
Australians have this small fetish to making it “big”. There are various tourist attractions here, like “Big Banana”, “Big Pineapple”, “Big Guitar”, “Big Mango”, and so forth. The Big Mango is actually just a visitor information center (with a huge Mango statue in the front, something like 20 meters high). I talked to the girl at the information there, and found out that “Bowen Mango” is well-known all over Australia; however, they hardly grow there Mangos - some years ago they all decided that tomatoes are much better so now it is a huge tomato-growth center with almost no mangos there - but they still have the reputation and the awesome statue.
When we arrived at Townsville we camped in a nice caravan park, and had two other nice meetings: One was with two girls - Evelyne from Canada and Marion from France. We met at the camp’s kitchen (Evelyne is a chef. She’s a great cooker and she’s going to Carins and I really hope to meet her there) and talked all through dinner and after it - we taught them some Hebrew words (Sababa) and they taught us some french habits (Sante!). Apart from the girls we also met at the camp a nice old Australian guy, who is circling Austrlia for the second time with his wife in a caravan. He gave us some really good advices that can probably save us a lot of money.
Today we went to Magnetic Island. The name (Cook’s choice, of course. He thought his compass went crazy here. Nobody else faced this problem) doesn’t tell the story about this remarkable place. We are mainly going to dive here - Roey has booked a diving course (which means we’ll be here for at least three more days) and I’m going tomorrow to dive the Yongala shipwreck. We met here Sylva and Anuk again, and hopefully will spend some time with them, too.
