Australia, Mission Beach: Caught in an Intense Tropical Storm

After spending a couple of days in Mackay, we continued our journey up the eastern coast of Australia, stopping again at Mission Beach. We were working our way north to the Cairns area where we had planned to meet up with Carl, a friend of Dan's, and had a couple of days before we needed to meet him. While we were in Brisbane, we enquired about bus tickets to travel up the east coast, and the man who sold us tickets suggested that we make Mission Beach a stop because it was a quaint beachside town and a favourite stop of his. We hadn't done a lot of research on the east coast at that time and decided to check it out.

The bus journey from Mackay to Mission Beach took nearly the whole day. We left at the early time of 7:20am after checking out of Larrikin Lodge hostel and boarded a bus driven by a friendly, but a little bit clueless, Russian man. He must have been new to his job, but he kept us amused with his inadequacies at loading people on and off the bus at each stop along the way; his commentaries in the morning to try and get all of the passengers to agree to watching a film were pretty hilarious, too, since most people didn't respond with it being so early, or difficult to understand his English.

Large pieces of hail were crashing down around the internet cafe and branches of trees started breaking off due to the high winds

The Russian driver was so entertaining to us that we, in fact, were sad when he left us in Townsville, just over halfway to Mission Beach, to be replaced by an Australian bus driver who, in true fashion as per the other Australian bus drivers Dan had whilst making his way up the east coast, was moody and grumpy for the entire journey. Throughout the long bus journey, the drivers made a few rest stops where we could buy drinks or snacks, and use the toilet; we read our books for most of the journey until a film called "In Good Company" was eventually put on the TV at the front of the bus. We finally arrived at Mission Beach after 5:00pm and hopped on a shuttle for the YHA Treehouse, the hostel we had booked ourselves into for the night.

YHA Treehouse was built to resemble a large tree house of some kind, but it was in fact a spacious building with rooms on the ground and top floor. The top floor of the two-storey building had a large communal kitchen area and lounge with sofas, wooden tables and chairs. The entire place was open-air, so it felt like you were living outside in the trees to an extent. We stayed there for two nights; on our first night in Mission Beach, we decided to stay in the hostel and relax, having a wonderfully inventive dinner that consisted of instant pot noodles and tortilla chips with salsa.

On that first night, we stayed in a dorm room, which we had to share with some moody Scandinavian girl who wouldn't talk to us; the most she emitted was a reluctant "yes" or "no" when we asked her questions. We had wanted to book a private room, but they were all fully booked when we called the day before to book a spot in the hostel. They did have a private room on our second and last night there, so we took it and it was much better than staying in the dorm. The crowd at the hostel was a strange mix of people; there was one group of people that might have had more than alcohol to drink before they went out on the lawn next to the hostel and started practicing twirling a rope around their heads, a rope with a ball of fire at each end of it!

The hostel had a nice pool that we didn't end up using. The main town of Mission Beach was at least a few miles from YHA Treehouse and when we did go into town during our time there, especially on our first day, we didn't make it back to the hostel until well past dark. We'll come to more on that soon when we tell you about the horrific tropical storm we were caught in on our first full day in the area. With the main part of town being quite a distance from the hostel, we couldn't walk there and had to rely on the shuttle bus to take us to town and back; it left a few times a day and we decided to venture into town on the first shuttle of the morning, on both of our mornings in Mission Beach, to have breakfast at one of the small cafe's there.

The area of Australia that we were in during that part of our "Land of Oz" adventure was one of the best areas in the country to spot rare and endangered cassowaries in the wild. A cassowary is an enormous bird that stands almost as tall as a human, but as tall as some human's, such as Dan's sister-in-law, Heidi, or Kyle's mum, Judy. They have a unique feature on the top of their heads, a rounded, smooth and thin bump that sits on top of their head like a solidified mohawk. Cassowaries also have a red, dangly piece of skin hanging below their necks, sort of like a turkey has hanging under its neck. It was fitting that we spotted one during our ride to the hostel after the YHA Treehouse shuttle bus picked us up; it was also the only time we saw one of the large flightless birds there, but we were happy nonetheless!

We mentioned being caught in a tropical storm. We thought it bordered on being a hurricane and many of the locals would probably have agreed with us had they been sitting next to us when we wrote that. When we went into town on our first full day in Mission Beach, we had a delicious Aussie breakfast (it was just like a full English breakfast) and iced coffees at Early Bird Coffee Shop, and then we spent some time writing travel stories before sharing a lamb souvlaki wrap for lunch there, and then we walked across the street to an internet cafe with wireless internet access. The morning and afternoon were glorious, with sunny skies and hot weather, but as the afternoon wore on, dark clouds gathered above us and thickened, blotting out all light.

When we were in the internet cafe using their wireless internet, it started raining. It didn't start slowly; it was like the heavens opened up and poured truck loads of rain on the small beachside town that we were hanging out in at the time. The wind decided to kick itself up a thousand notches and we looked out the window to see palm trees swaying back and forth and sheets of rain pelting down onto the ground at a 45 degree angle. It was so fortunate for us that we were inside a cool, dry internet cafe, at least until the power outage hit a few minutes after the storm began!

There were large pieces of hail crashing down around the internet cafe and branches of trees started breaking off due to the high winds. We had no idea what happened in the internet cafe, but the man running the place said that the power would return soon after it died. We thought it would be good to use our laptop battery for a couple of hours and wait out the storm, so we continued writing until the battery was used up. The power was still off when we were done, and it was after 6:00pm, so we decided to find some dinner; we wanted to wait out the rain before heading back to the hostel, and it was still coming down in buckets. The bar next door to the internet cafe was able to cook using gas and they made us a large portion of pasta bolognaise that we ended up sharing.

With the heavy storm, it became dark quicker than it normally would have done, and we were served our take away portion of pasta when night had fallen. To pay for the pasta, we handed over the last $20 AUD note we had between us and were then penniless. We weren't worried about running out of cash to pay for the food because there was an ATM near the internet cafe and there was enough moonlight peeking out of the clouds for us to see by to find the cash machine. What we didn't account for was the fact that the ATM machine was powered by electricity, which was still out!

The rain had stopped by the time we went to withdraw cash from the ATM, so we didn't get wet, but we didn't have any cash to use for a taxi back to the hostel; we had also missed the last shuttle bus because we wanted to have dinner in town (we didn't tell you earlier how unappealing it would have been to cook in the hostel's somewhat dirty kitchen with several other people). Worried about getting back to the hostel, we went to a payphone to ring them and see if they would be able to come and pick us up. That attempt at contact failed because the payphones were out of service, too. At that point, we considered walking back to the hostel, but it was very dark and we had no torch. Since we had both also seen the Aussie film "Wolf Creek", we also ruled out trying to hitchhike our way back to the hostel.

The mobile phone we were using in Australia didn't have a signal in Mission Beach; apparently, Vodafone was not the carrier of choice for the small town. We finally asked one of the staff at a bar on the main road in town if he could make a call for us on his mobile phone, which we knew was working because we passed by and saw him talking to someone on it. He didn't mind, called the hostel for us, and someone came to pick us up a little bit later. It was fortunate for us because the storm decided to kick back up a few minutes after we arrived back at YHA Treehouse, but we were comfortably in our dry room by then and didn't care.

The next day, we were supposed to catch a bus up the coast to Cairns, but the bus wasn't scheduled to depart Mission Beach until around 5:30pm. We wanted to spend the day in town instead of at the hostel, so we caught the first shuttle again and repeated our morning at Early Bird Coffee Shop. We had four hours left on the five hour wireless internet pass (5 hours for only $15 AUD, or £6, or $12 USD) we had bought from the internet cafe the day before, so we decided to take advantage of it before leaving town. We could actually connect to the internet cafe's wireless signal from Early Bird, so we used the internet there for a little while before heading back over the internet cafe itself.

For lunch that day, we decided to eat fish and chips from the local shop in town. The food was tasty with plenty of fish and chips in one portion for us to feel good about sharing it. When it came time for us to catch our hostel's shuttle bus from town to the bus station, we waited on the main street and flagged down the shuttle when it approached. We had arranged earlier that morning for the hostel to send our large backpacks with the shuttle, so that we wouldn't have had to carry them around town with us all day. Apparently, though, they forgot, even though we arranged it with three different people working at the hostel just to be sure.

The shuttle driver had to take us back to the hostel to collect our bags and then he had car trouble, so we had to wait for a second vehicle to take us to the bus station. As the second shuttle pulled into the petrol station, which was also the bus station, we saw the last couple of passengers boarding our bus and we quickly ran over to the driver to let him know we were still planning on making the journey to Cairns. A minute later, we had chosen our seats and the driver was pulling away from Mission Beach, heading north up the coast to our next destination; we were thankful that we didn't have to spend another day in Mission Beach by missing our bus.