The View From Castle Hill

Driving into Townsville you can’t help but notice Castle Hill.  It’s an iconic granite monolith that’s apparently just metres short of being classified as a mountain.  We drove to the top for a view of Townsville from above.  I’ve realised that although I have heaps of pictures of the view, I don’t have any pictures of Castle Hill itself.  You can see pictures of it here.  That means I also don’t have pictures of The Saint painted on the side of the hill.  Ooops.  We wondered about that graffiti, it seemed so out of place! This is the view looking north.  That’s Magnetic Island out there, you can take a ferry out and enjoy a day on the island, most of which is a national park. There’s a WWII observation post that still stands.  That’s not another island out there.  The coastline curves around to form a spectacular bay. See the rock?  The granite has a pink hue to it. There were heaps of people at the top taking in the views.  There were also heaps walking up the hill.  Another one of those fitness tracks popular with the locals, we’ve run into a few of those. We had fun pointing out some of the places we’d been.  We could just make out the waterpark where the kids had loads of fun getting drenched. I think this is the view looking south and a bit west.  Townsville has a population of about 200,000 people and it felt huge compared to all the small towns we’d been in lately.  That river is the Ross River.  Yes, the one that Ross River Fever was named after. While we were there  we were lucky to see a couple of sky divers come in for landings on the beach.  There are two in this picture, bit hard to see.  They both seemed to make good landings from what we could see! This monument is in the carpark, it says that Townsville was named after Robert Towns and this monument was moved to Castle Hill from his grave in Sydney.  Apparently he only spent three days in Townsville but they named the city after him since he provided financial assistance to the fledgling town.  Townsville is such a generic name I hadn’t guessed it was named after someone with that name! See all the people in the background?  I was surprised how many people were up there, it was such a busy spot.  A short, steep drive with great views!