Magnetic Island

I left Cairns early in the morning to catch the bus to Townsville which is aproximately 350 km south og Cairns. From there I took the ferry to Magnetic Island which is just 8km away from the coast. Magnetic Island received its name from Captain Cook as when he was sailing along the island his compass spun without aparent reason and he thought that it was due to magnetic fields on the island. He later got proven wrong, it was probably just the fault of his aluminium cup with rum that made the compass react, but the name stayed. Anyway I found the name quite suitable as this island has a magnetic attraction, arriving there is like arriving in Paradise. The island is sparely populated (4.000 islander) and the tourists stay in view places as nearly 2/3 of the island is national park. I took the bus to Horseshoe bay which lays on the other side of the island seen from the ferry, and put up my tend on the camp ground of the YHA. Really great place with crazy parrots flying around and cosy huts the backpackers can sleep in. Nevertheless I decided to camp as I have been carrying around this bl... heavy tent for so long and havn't used it since the Overlandtrack.

The rest of the day I spend chilling out at the beach, although stinger season has started, there haven't been spotted any yet though it still made me nervous swimming in the see in case of an encounter with one of those dreadful jelly fish and you can't really enjoy it as much as you should.

After an early sleep in my tent, it gets dark so early here that at 7 pm it feels as though it was already much later. The next day I started with a harty bush tacker breakfast (brunch) with grilling your own toast over the fire, nice fish, pancakes, bacon and so on. During the breakfast, we were able to stroke a baby crocodile named Barbie and a snake. Later also the sleepy Koala was brought out. I didn't take a picture with him on my arm though as he is really keen on touching women's breast :-). After filling my stomach I wanted to do as much hiking as possible, but the temptation to just hang around the beautiful beaches after the first view kilometres was just to high. So instead of hiking a lot and seing most of the 16 bays, I limited the number of bays visited but swam in nearly all of them. Of course always on the watch for our slimy friends in the water. The beaches are really beautiful and as most of them are only reachable on walking tracks not many people found their way to them. After another nice and undisturbed night sleep in my pretty yellow tent I left this beautiful spot again and headed for only 2 hours on the bus to Ayr where I was diving the SS Yongala. But more about this later.