Hello everyone,

We had a lovely time at Magentic Island, the island is beautiful.

We arrived late afternoon on Thursday after a 6 hour bus journey from Cairns and a ferry across from Townsville. We arrived at our hostel, Magnums and we thought it was lovely. It had a big pool and a large area to sit and a bar etc, we thought we had found something special. That was until we went into our room and it was awful! It had an awful smell, that the Dutch girls in our room described as 'dead bodies!' We didn't even get a pillow! I know we are backpacking but seriously no pillows! Needless to say we didn't spend much time at all in the room!

After we checked in we went down to the beach which was literally over the road and took about 1 minute to walk to. It was called Alma Bay and was really pretty and very secluded, surrounded by rocks. We spent a while there, where I obviously fell asleep! Later on we went to find the kitchen in the hostel, only to find out there was one but it was terrible, no cooker etc and as we have a budget of $0 we had to find something very cheap to buy!

On Friday we woke up pretty early and went down to Alma Bay again. It was one of the only beaches on the island that had stinger nets in and because of the way the tide was it was very rare for there to be any jelly fish in the sea so we asked the lifeguard who said it was safe and had a swim! The weather was so hot and both Matt and I got burnt. He burnt his forehead which was very funny! We spent the afternoon by the pool in Magnums. Later on that night we went back down to the beach and had a bbq. A lot of the beaches in Australia have bbqs at them so we sat by the beach having a barbie and having a couple of fosters! When it got dark a load of wallabies came out and were bounding across the beach which was really cool to see.

Saturday we got up and headed back to Townsville for our journey down to Airlie beach and ready for our Whitsunday sailing trip which we go on tomorrow (Monday) for 2 days/2 nights! I'll give you an update when we get back.

Speak soon

Liz

xxxxx