Is this Australia's worst holiday destination?
In 2008, Mt Isa's mayor picked up some free publicity for putting out a call for ugly chicks to move to his town. Snaggletoothed harridans, he suggested, would be welcome on his patch, as blokes outnumbered the girls five to one, and the hard-drinking miners had the beer goggles on most of the time anyway. After visiting the mining town for the first time, I can tell you this: the blokes aren't going to be winning any glamour awards anytime soon. If you're a single female looking for a man, don't come here. In fact, Mt Isa is, in the most gentle terms I can use in a family blog, a shithole. If mineral resources hadn't been found there nearly a century ago, it would probably still be a blot on the map, sometimes passed by travellers on their way to the Red Centre. Instead, it's now a city of more than 25,000. It takes about 18 hours to drive to Mt Isa from Brisbane, or, if coming from the other direction, close to 25 hours from Darwin. That's ...