Cannot invoke indexOf on an Array of strings?

I'm writing a method to calculate the distance between 2 towns in a given array by adding all the entries between the indexes of the two towns in the second array, but I can't invoke indexOf on the first array to determine where the addition should start. Eclipse is giving me the error "Cannot invoke indexOf on array type String[]" which seems pretty straight forward, but I do not understand why that won't work. Please note the program is definitely not complete.

public class Exercise_3 {
public static void main(String[] args){
    //Sets the array 
    String [] towns={"Halifax","Enfield","Elmsdale","Truro","Springfield","Sackville","Moncton"};
    int[] distances={25,5,75,40,145,55,0};
    distance(towns, distances, "Enfield","Truro");
}
public static int distance(String[] towns,int[] distances, String word1, String word2){
    int distance=0;
    //Loop checks to see if the towns are in the array
    for(int i=0; i<towns.length; i++){
        if(word1!=towns[i] || word2!=towns[i] ){
            distance=-1;
        }
    //Loop is executed if the towns are in the array, this loop should return the distance 
        else{
            for(int j=0; j<towns.length; j++){
                *int distance1=towns.indexOf(word1);*


            }
        }                               
    }
    return distance;
}
}