We set off early from the Whitsundays and headed up to Townsville in order to catch the ferry to Magnetic Island.
We stopped off at the giant mango on the way near Bowen. It's just like a huge plastic mango model at the side of the road, very random, but a popular theme here in Oz, we've passed the giant pinapple and the giant orange... not sure what that's all about, but good for a quick stop and a giggle.
With it being the rainy season the weather was pretty crummy on the way up and to add to the fun just before we got to Townsville a car flicked a stone up off the road and smashed the windscreen!!
Not fun at all, over the next 20kms or so we watched as the glass slowly fractured more and more. We contacted the hire place and explained the situation and they advised that we should head to the local airport and get a replacement car. It was no trouble really they swapped us over no worries and more importantly at no cost and we were back on our way, but it did slow our trip down and we missed our 12.30pm ferry and had to catch the 2.40pm one instead.
The trip across was pretty choppy and we could see the car moving on the deck..... it probably wasn't really moving that far, but it looked like it was breathing each time we went over a wave!
When we landed we headed to our accomodation, dumped the bags and headed out to explore the island. It's only really small and you can get round it quite comfortably in an afternoon. We visited all of the little bays and had a good explore and saw loads of wildlife from tree frogs, ghekos, geese, stone curlews and parrots. The island is pretty wild so I expect we will see lots of cool creatures along the way - hopefully we wont see any in the room though as I'm not sure I could take another Byron Bay experience!!!
The hostel we are in is slap bang in the middle of a wildlife conservation park which I think we will try and check out in more detail tomorrow, I'm seeing lots of posters for "bush tucker lunches", I'm not sure if that means eating witchety grubs and kangaroo balls, but hey lets have a looksee and we will let you know how it goes tomorrow.
Here are a few pics of the various bays:
Hudson:
Just a completely random aside that I forgot to mention a couple of weeks ago from the Blue Mountains. We got talking to a lady in a shop and she was telling us her son played cricket for Yorkshire in 2001. He's called Darren Reeves and was apparently the highest run scorer that year. So dad, I hope you've heard of him - I haven't!!
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