After hopping off the Greyhound in Townsville for one night, we skipped onto the ferry and jumped off in Magnetic Island. Not literally of course, people would just have pointed and laughed…it'd also have been quite tough with those bags! But we got there. Magnetic Island is 8km off the coast, east of Townsville. It's quite a small island with most of the activities dotted along a 10 km stretch of the coastline opposite Townsville. We stayed at the Base Backpackers on the island, which was sold to us as a clean, lively hostel right on the beach but turned out to be quite a filthy hostel with randy teenagers everywhere! I think we'll give Base a miss in future!

We checked in and spent the afternoon reading by the pool as it was too late to get stuck into anything. The following day we rented a mini moke (bit like a golf buggy for anyone unfamiliar), which was a wee auld car but the most popular way of whizzing about the island and great fun to drive! We headed to one of the beaches called Horseshoe Bay first and raked about with our newly acquired Wabooba ball, 'the ball that bounces on water' (in the stinger nets of course!) After this we decided to check out one of the walks and decided to dander on the Forts walk, which leads up through old WWII building remains. Townsville became a major military port during the war and a major shipping route, so defences were set up on Magnetic Island to protect it. Despite the heavy shielding, guns were only ever fired once though, and it was on a friendly unannounced US Naval ship. So that's your history over.

The buildings were interesting enough, and the views were pretty impressive, but the clear highlight was the two wild koalas (or 'walas as Claire calls them) that we saw sleeping in a tree next to the path, a mummy and a baby! Claire had really wanted to see wild koalas at some point in Australia and everyone had been saying we'd be really lucky to and here on the first real search for them, we found them! It's amazing how much time we spent just watching two little bears just lying in a tree, but it seems to be such a rare thing so we're glad we took it in. There's some pretty cute photos of them coming too! We're sure you'll agree they were worth snapping as much as we did.

We had a drink that night with 'the kids' (can't believe we're saying that, how old are we??) in the hostel bar, which was actually really nice as it was a decking area just looking out over the sea, and there was a full moon that night. We had actually expected them to be running their monthly full moon party that night when we booked but they'd had it the previous week (maybe a half moon party???), probably due to Easter so that was a bit disappointing. The following morning we set off on the moke again before our lunchtime drop off and went to the Bungalow Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. This was a bit like a mini zoo and gave you a chance to hold some animals like a baby saltwater croc, cockatoo, a snake, and best of all a baby koala! The koala was the real reason we were there!His name is Dexter and he has his own facebook page - how 21st century.We got a wee cuddle with the wee man and we were very happy to hear that he only worked civil service type shifts - i.e. no more than 30 mins a day, 4 days a week and not allowed to work more than 2 days in a row, by law.Dexter was not a stressed out fella.OOOooo we were also told to stick our tongues' out hovering over an ants nest, where we got a nice wee surprise where they essentially attacked us, but it sent in a nice wee citrusy flavour of mild acid into our mouths - weird.We were sad to return our freedom giving moke mobile back and returned to the hostel with our souvenir photos in the bag.

The following day, with no moke for transport and no sun shining we got a bus to go for a walk to a couple of spots on the island.It was a 6km walk that took in some secluded bays and lead round to the main Horseshoe Bay at the end. We hadn't mentioned before, but there were warning signs at every walk to avoid the 'very venomous death adder snake' that was ominously named and was a local resident! The tips were to stay on walking paths, don't enter long grass or leaves, and walk around any snake you see. Essentially this walk took us winding through a variety of patches of long grass and leaves. We were pretty unsettled by this. There was a storm bubbling up over sea and by the end of the walk we had been drenched, but it was much better than sitting around the hostel wasting a day! It cleared up in the afternoon and we had more wabooba ball fun and also rented out a pedlow to mess about in on the sea, and saw some sea turtles as they came to the surface for air. Pretty cool. We rounded the trip off by sharing a jumbo pizza in the bay for dinner.

An appealing fact about Magnetic Island is that they get an average of 320 days of sun a year. 3 of the 4 days we were there…it rained! Hmm. We left Magnetic Island on Easter Sunday and not an Easter egg in sight. So we grabbed ourselves some chocolate bars for the 5 hour bus journey south to Airlie Beach where we've been for a few days waiting for our sailing trip around the Whitsunday Islands, which departs on Friday.

Keep in touch!

Chris and Claire xx