A day trip to Maggie

After enjoying our previous day in Townsville, we decided that would stay another day and travel to Magnetic Island which is only 8km from Townsville. We had collected a few leaflets of different packages available for the island and had decided on a package that included return ferry tickets, a complimentary drink on board and a day hire for a moke. It was really reasonable and we were pleasantly surprised that when we rang up to book it had been reduced by another $30 so we got the car hire for next to nothing.

The roads were really busy and it took us ages to reach the ferry terminal and we had missed the 10.30am ferry. We would never have made it anyway considering the timetable we had been looking at had said the wrong times. By the time we had queued up for our tickets there was only a short wait for the next ferry.

The ferry was really modern with comfortable seats and a bar where you could collect your free drink. We had planned to get a beer for our picnic that we had made to eat on the island. However, the lady opened Rach's can of beer which ruined that idea, so we had to drink them on the way (at 11.30am!!)

Unfortunately, the weather was really bad again so we ran from the ferry port in Nelly Bay to the car hire place which was just across a car park. We saw a really impressive and shiny moke called George in the car park which someone must have paid thousands to do up. We were sure ours wouldn't look as smart as that.

Fortunately for us, our mini moke had a hood on it to protect us from the rain but we still got really wet as rain seeped in from the sides but it was all good fun! The moke had lots of dents and scratches and we warned it was over 30 years old and was not the easiest thing to drive.

The island was a lot bigger than Dunk Island so we were really happy to have the moke and it was nice to have every other hired car beep and wave to us when we went past. We had a quick drive around the island, avoiding the roads we were forbidden to go on. We doubt if the moke would have been able to make it up these roads anyway and we wanted to avoid any of the fines.

We stopped for our picnic but had to eat it inside the car to shelter from the rain. We managed to spot some wild wallabies by the road and take some photos.

After lunch we headed on one of the walking paths in the hope of finding some wild koalas. At the start of the walkway, we were warned about Death Adders that could be found along the path - not the best when you're wearing flip-flops! We just hoped we would find a koala and not a snake.

We had walked over an hour in the rain seeing little in the way of marsupials. However, the walk did provide some excellent views of the landscape and old ruins of a fort from WWII. Thinking we wouldn't be able to find any koalas, we started to make our way down the path and back towards the car park. Suddenly we heard the unmistakable sound of the female koala doing her mating call somewhere in the forest. We decided to go off the beaten track in a search to find it hoping they would keep making their mating call until we found it.

We came across lots more ruins but no koala. We decided to head back to the path. About 100m away we saw a French man pointing up into the trees. We thought he may just be pointing at one of the birds we had seen along the way but he was pointing to a koala he had spotted sleeping in the tree.

After the French man had gone, we took some photos of our own and pointed them out to two more sets of people who had also been searching for the sleepy koalas. At this point we realised there was in fact two koalas in the tree. They look so obvious when you find them but they are really hard to spot at first.

We were stopped by lots of people on the way back down to the car park (mainly females) asking if we had spotted a koala so we tried to direct them to the ones we had found. On our way back, we gave a lift to one of the French guys we had met on the walk to his hostel in Arcadia before heading to the car depot to hand our mini-moke back.

The weather was getting even worse and on the ferry back the sea was really rough. We decided to get a takeaway and settled on a place called Red Rooster for a burger for Rich and a chicken wrap for Rach.

They even have full roast chickens and vegetables that you can buy so we joked about how we should have Christmas lunch there! On our way out we noticed a sign that said 'open Christmas Day' so maybe we will end up there if we get desperate!