Queensland north of Bundaberg seems a lot like the American mid-West – filled with small towns, all built on a grid system, populated with squat purpose-built buildings. It feels like you've been transported back in time to the mid-1950s.

This is definitely the working part of the state. As we learned in Bundaberg, the dominant industry is sugar cane, and we drove past more fields of sugar cane all the way up the coast. Sugar cane trains regularly sped by along the railroads, as it's currently crop harvesting time over here. A visit to the Sugar Industry Museum (no really, it was fascinating) taught us that Australia is the second biggest global exporter of sugar, second only to Brazil. Although mechanisation has gone some way to modernise the industry, it still seems pretty traditional – much like the towns the workers live and drink (Bundy) in.

After a while, all these towns started to merge together a bit, but here are a few of our highlights:

Gympie (seriously) is a former gold-rush town, which reached its peak in the mid-19th century as the first gold mining town in Queensland. Today it is home to such gems as the 'Hair Force One' hairdressers and 'A Man's Toybox' – which is a tractor store, before anyone gets any other ideas.

Maryborough was actually the hometown of PL Travers, who wrote Mary Poppins. This appears to be its sole note-worthy feature; aside from this, it's just another quaint market town.

Rockhampton, or 'Rockie' as it's affectionately known to locals, prides itself on being the Beef Capital of Australia. There are apparently, some 2M cows within 250km of the town, and to celebrate this fact, the powers that be have commissioned...wait for it....6 life-size plastic cows around the town's main streets. It didn't exactly match up to Bath's pigs back in the UK, but we did amuse ourselves for some, oh, 10 minutes trying to find them all.

We learned that boozy Mackay is considering closing its main street of a weeknight in order to dissuade drunken teens from hanging around and making a nuisance of themselves. Considering how little there is to do there, it's hardly surprising that they are turning to alcohol – we were just amazed it wasn't anything stronger. It does have a nice beach though.

Bowen amused us with its 'Bowenwood' sign up on the hill as you drive into the town. Someone on the council clearly has a sense of humour.

Townsville. What is the point of Townsville? Seriously? Allegedly the 'second biggest town in northern Queensland,' we struggled to find its centre. Were it not for the free internet in the library we would've struggled to fill half an hour. But perhaps I'm just being unkind, and there's a thriving....something....going on there somewhere that we just missed.

Much more to my liking was Innisfail, a town from the 1920s. When most of the (timber) buildings were destroyed in a cyclone in 1918, the people decided to rebuild in stone, in keeping with the fashion of the day. As a result, the whole place is constructed in an art deco style – lots of rounded edges, portholes and sunbeams. In order to keep things consistent, all new buildings have to be designed in the same way, and so the effect is like being on a film set. James was less than impressed and stayed in the car, but I insisted on doing the walking tour of the main street, to fully appreciate the place.

Much more exciting than most of the towns (Innisfail excepted) were the giant objects which Australia has erected as random 'tourist attractions' in this part of the world. We first read about them in Bill Bryson's 'Down Under' and had I not now seen a few with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed they existed. The giant objects tend to be something which locals believe sums up the character of their village or town. So far we've seen a giant mango and a wellington boot, to commemorate 'the wettest town in Queensland.' Tully received some 7.9m of rain in 1950, thus beating out Innisfail and Babington to the title. The giant boot is exactly 7.9m tall, and you can climb an internal spiral staircase to reach the top and get great views....of the sugar cane factory opposite. Apparently there is a giant lobster and also a giant koala somewhere around here too. I live in hope of seeing them before we leave.