From Airlie Beach we headed 5 hours further north to Townsville, which to be honest neither of us knew that much about. Our guide books said it was an underrated city, so we weren't holding out much hope for anything special, but it's a surprisingly nice place. We didn't do that much on the first afternoon as we had a load of washing to do, but the next day we set out to explore the town. We walked along the main street to have a look at the shops, and then went to Victoria Bridge for some nice views of the river. From there we headed further along to get to the coast and to walk up the Strand. It's a really nice coastal walk going past the marina and some nice beaches (where you can't swim), and it goes for about 2km. We walked along and went out on some of the little jetties, which had some great views of the town and of Magnetic Island across the water, and went as far as Kissing Point Lookout, where we had a look around the Jezzine Barracks, which date from the Second World War. It was also quite high up so it had some nice views of the town, along the coast, and of Castle Hill which is an almost mountain in the middle of the city. We then walked back along the Strand to get some lunch from a little kiosk halfway along, which was really cheap and really good. The next day we took a daytrip across to Magnetic Island, which was about 25 minutes away from the town. We landed in the main town of Nelly Bay, where we had lunch overlooking the marina, and after we had hired some stinger suits we walked along the coast to Geoffrey Bay to do some snorkelling. They had a snorkel trail here, which sort of guides you in the water and tells you what you can see, so we followed that and it was pretty good - the visibility wasn't great, but we saw loads of fish, coral, some huge sea urchins and some stingrays. Back on land we were surrounded by loads of cute and very curious rock wallabies - they were really interested in Joel's camera and they came right up to us, even letting us stroke them! Some of them had joeys, which are the cutest things ever, and I named a particularly friendly one Wilma. We then headed back along the coast to get the ferry back to Townsville, and along the way we spotted some sea eagles which was pretty amazing as they were flying quite low, so we got a good look at them. On our final day we just wandered around the town again sorting out money and finding places to eat, but we did go past the Old Railway Station which we had a look at. It's definitely a much nicer town than the guidebooks gave it credit for!