Avoid Mackay

Things get off to a bad start: our train dumps us in Mackay at about 2:30 am, and we have to wait a good 45 minutes for our taxi. It’s not too long a ride to the hotel I’ve booked — the Whitsunday International Hotel, or “The Whit” as contraction-happy locals call it — and right away we learn that the Lonely Planet’s descriptions can occasionally be generous. It’s something of a dump.

To illustrate: I’m the first one into the bathroom when we enter our room, and it’s a good thing too, because I find the biggest damn cockroach I’ve ever seen, and that includes in the creepy-stuff sections of zoos, just hanging out in the bathtub, on its back, basking, surrounded by little brown things that are either its poops or its babies. I’m without a weapon in here, and can’t slam a shoe onto the porcelain tub without drawing attention, so I try to grab it with toilet paper to flush it away. But it’s slippery, and escapes into a crack above the door. The nuggets I just wash down the drain. I decide not to tell my mother about the encounter, and she still doesn’t know. This will be a good way to find out if she actually reads this weblog thing.

When we wake up we’re still undecided how long we’ll be staying in Mackay — the room’s only booked for one day, so it’s up in the air. We explore the little riverside town, not especially picturesque, though maybe we’ve been desensitized to picturesque by all the abundantly picturesque places we’ve already been. We eventually get ourselves to the tourist information centre, grab a few pamphlets, see what there is in this town with an economy based, I would wager, almost entirely on gambling. I would wager. (Bonus vocab lesson: “Pokies” are what contraction-happy Australians call poker machines. Which makes it an oft-seen word in Mackay.)

We get to the tourist centre in time to sign up for a tour, and an hour or so later we’re the only ones in the van with Kenneth, or Jeff, or whatever his name is, watching a fairly detailed history of the area on a monitor. He drives us out to Cape Hillsborough National Park, and takes us first to a beach (just covered in sand bubbler crabs), then along a nearby path up a steep hill through the rainforest. Let me tell you, this guy Kenneth-or-Jeff is a knowledgeable son of a bitch — he can not be stumped; knows all the trees, all the bugs, all the history. Man runs a good, educational tour, albeit a short one. We’re both sort of expecting a second location, but we just head right back to dreary Mackay.

There’s nothing to do in this town, which shuts down completely at 5 o’clock, save for the numerous Pokie houses (the gambling kind of Pokie, not the other, better kind), and the movie theatre, which isn’t showing anything worth seeing. But there is another theatre north of the town which has Apocalypto, so, as much as my mother probably isn’t interested in seeing voluminous on-screen carnage from the form’s current king, that’s where we’re going.

The cab drops us off at the theatre, one of those large ones out in the wasteland, far from anything but tract housing. And around midnight, when the movie ends (and it was a good one — Holocaust or no, Mel Gibson can make an exciting romp), I just can’t get the damn special payphone in the theatre lobby to work. I try to put in my money, but it won’t let me. So I just dial the number posted on a big sheet of paper right above the phone, and it connects, but then cuts me off after five seconds. I say screw it, and decide to find a real payphone outside.

Big mistake, because there’re no pay phones in the suburbs. But after a quick explore, when we give up and come back to ask the popcorn counter guy to show us simple-headed foreigners how a phone works, they’ve shut the theatre down. It takes us well over an hour to wander the neighbourhood (followed most of the way by a l’il scrapper of a dog named Elmo, who runs off right before I can call the number on his collar) before we find a 24-hour Pokie establishment, who are kind enough to call a cab for us, when I can’t get their payphone to work, either.

You may be wondering why we would see so late a movie, thus dooming ourselves to stay another night in Mackay. We would’ve been quite ready to leave that day, but recall when I said there weren’t all that many trains running in Australia? Well, when I said that I was talking about the south-eastern state New South Wales. Once we got to Brisbane we’d passed into Queensland, and compared to Queensland, NSW is abundant in trains. There was no train anytime after our tour with Kenneth-or-Jeff ended, and there are no trains today, so we have to stay another two nights (though our final will be cut short, as that train leaves at about 5 am).

And the really appealing tour we wanted to do on day three isn’t happening, because there aren’t enough people signing up (you need at least 3, they had 2). So I guess today will just be spent hanging out in Mackay, then returning to The Whit (not having told my mother about the giganto-roach, she decides we may as well just stay there). We do make a nice little trip in the evening to a beach north of the city, but overall, not much is done with this vacation day.

Mackay’s big attraction is supposed to be the Whitsunday Islands, and we saw a bit of them on our tour with K-or-J, and would’ve seen even more of them had our second tour happened. But I have to say, unless you love gambling, head a bit further north to Arlie Beach if you want to see the islands. Avoid Mackay.