Magnetic Island

The next morning was an early one again, onto our oz bus and headed south down the coast. We had a loudmouth aussie female driver, who had to put awesome into every scentence and loved speaking on the microphone almost the whole trip - no sleeping was done.

We did stop at a quality croc farm where the Steve Irwin imposter jumped onto the bus with croc in hand to try and scare us, most people were too tired to notice. THe highlight was seeing a rather large aussie name mick sitting on one of the biggest crocs ever seen in Queensland. We also got to hold a small crocodile who insisted on crapping when the trainer grabbed hold of him.

We continued on to a place called magnetic island, which is a very idylic island of a place called townsville. The island is beautiful however there is not alot to do. We did however for some strange reason decide to trak all the way round a cove climbing on the rocks, some of which were a little on the dogdy side, and the nthe tide started coming in. You hear these horror stories of people being trapped on rocks while the tide comes in, i knew i was fine, cos i have a phone, but it was still a bit on the crazy side, especially when wh had to jump from rock to rock avoiding incoming waves and dodge overhanging spider webs with quite nasty looking critters in them. We finally arrived at the next bay pretty much too tired to do anything. The evening involved drinking overpriced pitchers and wathcing cane toad racing. Where an overweight aussie pensioner yelled out strange words and gathered peoples money for betting on the races. It takes about 30min to get bets for the 8 toads and the race takes on average about 10sec. Another backwards aussie tradition i think.

The next day we headed to the old WW2 forts on the island, it took ages to get there and by the time we did it was getting dark but we trudged on hoping to catch the sunset from the top of the lookout tower. After winding up and up, keeping our eyes out for koala's, wallaby's, spiders and the deadly death adder, we arrived at the top just as the sun had dropped behind the horizon. The comms tower and lookout tower were the main remains and they were rather creepy at night, we were lucky we'd remembered torches as the return journey would have been impossible without them. We scarpered back walking through countless spiderwebs and tripping out at the slightest rustles in the bushes, usually behind us.

Tomorrow we head for Airlie Beach and a two day sailing trip on the Whitsundays, i really hope my stomach is up to this one, prob going to have to lay off the VB.