I mentioned we feel a little culture shock arriving in Cairns, with its city atmosphere after our weeks in the outback. However it doesn’t take long to get used to the creature comforts of city living: like decent coffee, even if you do have to specify double shots.

We fall in love with the charms of Cairns and later, 350 kms south, Townsville. The cities are similar in some ways, particularly in that they make the absolute most of their stunning coastal locations, both having fabulous long walking/biking paths extending for kilometres, along with free public swimming pools by the sea front. Yet, the cities differ significantly. Cairns is a party dude – it shouts WOOHOO “let’s do stuff! come see my attractions:  the Great Barrier Reef! The Daintree Rainforest! Fraser Island! Port Douglas!”.

Townsville counts on more prosaic economies than tourism – namely defence, with four major defence establishments and 15,000 defence personnel, and manufacturing. It is the only city globally to refine three different base metals – zinc, copper and nickel, and there are plans for a $2 billion lithium-ion battery production facility. Take that you environmentalists. The city is dominated by Castle Hill, a 286 metre high pink granite monolith plonked in the heart of town. It gives stunning views out to Magnetic Island and over the surrounding area, and is popular as a hill running track for freaks and lunatics. We spot several examples on our drive up the hill.

Townsville also has an eye to tourism but without as much to offer as Cairns. We spend a couple of hours at Reef HQ, the excellent aquarium where you can visit the reef without leaving land. We learn about even more things that can kill you. Who knew there’s a deadly sea snail? Not me. The Cone Snail is harmless looking and lives in a pretty shell. But pretty can be deadly: through a harpoon like tooth the snail shoots venom that paralyses. Yes, people have died. Word on the marine biology street is, if it’s a cone, leave it alone.

Townsville has an arty alter ego as shown by the Council funded Street Art project. A walking trail takes us around 24 commissioned pieces by a mix of world renowned artists – as none of them were Banksy I’d never heard of any of them – and local talent. It is quite simply fabulous.

In between Cairns and Townsville lies the Cassowary Coast, so called because it is the home of Australia’s weirdest bird – the Cassowary, but more on that later. There are sugarcane and banana plantations as far as the eye can see. The beaches, particularly Mission Beach, are worth writing home about: long, long stretches of white sand and waving palm trees. You may have caught the news last week revealing a developer has spent $200 million buying properties in Mission Beach as well as another $31 million for Dunk Island – destroyed by Cyclone Yasi in 2011. It explains why, when we rang with an idle query about a beach side vacant site, the agent told us it was under offer for $900,000. How we laughed.

Driving the Cassowary Coast, we see more signs announcing the presence of Cassowary than actual Cassowary. It is surely the Scarlet Pimpernel of birds. Even so, it’s wise to be Casso-wary: it is the largest forest bird in the world – it can’t fly, but it can run up to 50kph, jump up to 1.5m, swim and – oh yes – disembowel you with its dagger like claws.

So when I finally do see one, I almost fall off my bike in my efforts to catch up and photograph it. Stealthy David Attenborough I’m not.

While we are in the heart of sugarcane country we take the opportunity to go to Tully a nearby sugar cane mill which annually produces about 260,000 tonnes of raw sugar for export. You know how you go places and they give you safety gear and you wonder why – this tour is the exception. We are taken through a busy noisy, dirty factory that shows us everything from the cane train arrival to the raw sugar being loaded onto trucks to go to the coast for export. It takes about eight tonnes of cane to produce one tonne of raw sugar. They don’t say how many tonne to give you diabetes.

It is amusing to find Tully prides itself on being the wettest town in Australia with an average annual rainfall of 4,000mm. Of course it wouldn’t be a small Australian town if it didn’t have a giant artefact: what would you build to declare your town’s rainy fame? What about a golden gumboot? I would so like to have been at the meeting when that decision was made.

It must be apparent by now this blog is not real time. Since Townsville we’ve driven the Flinders Highway through Charters Towers, Hughenden (more dinosaurs) and Julia Creek. Today finds us back at Mt Isa – a different, quieter town from when we were here for the rodeo six weeks ago. We’re at the same Caravan Park, but instead of over 100 sites in occupation, there are a dozen. Instead of a temperature of 25-26 degC it’s now 34-35. We’re hot – damn hot. We were looking forward to heading south to Alice and Uluru for cooler weather but I see it’s heading for the mid 30s there too this week. I’ll be a grease spot on Uluru.