Whilst in the Townsville region we had planned to visit Magnetic Island. However decided against it when the ferry people told us the fee to take the 'Wizard of Oz' (our campervan) across for the day would be around 150 quid...WHAT????? It turns out it's bigger than the average camper...while I'm sure that fact boosted the Wizards ego we decided to save our pennies and visit Billabong Sanctuary instead!

The Billabong Sanctuary is an Australian wildlife sanctuary where you can feed kangaroos by hand, stroke wombats, watch crocodiles eyeing up keepers as a potential meal and hold koalas and crocs. We did it all although our hand feeding of creatures came to an abrupt halt when Phil inadvertently let a passing goose run off with our bag of seed...he started chasing it but gave up when it took to water!

We even finally came eyeball to eyeball with a real Cassowary and fed it melon...melon?????? This isn't the savage beasty we had grown to fear!!!!! Must have been tamed by its 12 years in captivity!

We stayed at a great campsite on the edge of a national park where kangaroos hopped past as you were eating brekkie. Phil wasn't so keen on the place though...he had been directing us to do a few 'blair witch - esque' video camera scenes in night vision the night before and with it being Halloween we think he may have been convinced that an axe murderer really was lurking in the mens showers!