Hi Everyone,

It's been a while since the last blog update, but we've done a lot, and also not done a lot! Over the past 2 weeks Australia has had an incredible amount of rain and flooding, the worst for a long time, and it has unfortunately hindered what we have been able to do along the east coast, but we have tried to make the most of the experience nonetheless! We left Cairns for Magnetic Island, just off the coast near Townsville, and stopped off at Mission Beach for a night. There was a lot of rain during the drive down, though we were still able to have a walk on the beach and have a little look at the town. We stayed in a motel run by an english couple who moved out here a few years ago, and they were really nice and helpful, giving us lots of useful information about Magnetic Island and also the Whitsundays.

We started our Magnetic Island trip by getting the ferry from Townsville to the harbour at Nelly Bay. It was a lovely crossing with great weather, and we took our car onboard too so we could explore the island. We checked in to our hostel, which was a very interesting place. It was the Bungalow Bay Koala Village which is a youth hostel, and also has a wildlife sanctuary on-site too. The hostel is set amongst the forests and just walking around you get to see lots of wildlife just roaming free. There was a possum in the kitchen above the kitchen cabinets too, which surprised us at first, but the other guests who had been there a bit longer just ignored it! We had a nice refreshing swim at Horseshoe Bay beach, which was our first Australian swim in the sea. It felt great!

The next day we did a 2km walk through the bush to a local lookout point, which was very hot, but we were rewarded with seeing a koala in the wild. The whole of Magnetic Island is apparently a good place to spot koalas in the wild, so we were really happy to spot one, though it wasn't as easy as we thought it would be. A lot of the wildlife here knows how to blend in and camouflage itself. After our long walk we had another swim in the sea to cool off, and then had a drive to Picnic Bay for a walk along the pier.

On our final day, after exploring the island a bit more, we took advantage of the fact we had a widlife sanctuary at our hostel and booked ourselves in for a tour of the sanctuary, where we got to hold a variety of animals, like crocodiles (baby ones but still crocodiles!), lizards, snakes, parakeets, dragons and, best of all, a koala. Its name was Barney and it was very cute. We were able to pose for a picture with it, which was worth the extra money we paid. We were told to stand very still when holding him because if you move, he may think you'll drop him, so he'll dig his claws in very tight! So that's a good tip for if you ever hold a koala! The wildlife tour was a great way to end our stay on the island - highly recommend it for a relaxing break!