When you travel around from town to town, they rarely seem to be what you expect when you get there. They are usually much bigger or smaller than you expected. Often towns with not much information published about them seem to actually be pretty cool places to hang out for a bit of wilderness recuperation. On the other hand, towns that seem to get the most hype in Lonely Planet often seem way overrated and a bit rundown and past their prime (with boarded up shops, etc).
One such town was Charleville, QLD. Charleville had numerous boarded up shops and not a whole lot to see in the area. It was also extremely hot and very difficult to cool off in. There was nowhere to escape the heat – no real shade, boiling hot water coming out of pipes, and even a hot swimming pool.
Charleville did have a good astronomy show on at their local observatory, which was pretty modern compared to the rest of the town. They treated us to a nighttime show in which we were shown telescope views of the bands on Jupiter and some of its moons, distant gaseous galaxies forming, the moon up close, and other stellar stuff. Very cool show and the best I have seen in a while.
One funny thing about Charleville is that it seemed as though no one had ever seen a bike being transported on the roof of a car before. My bike seemed to attract endless fascination by the locals there. Very odd considering every other town I’ve come through didn’t really seem to care.
