This day I woke up at 6:00 am, had breakfast, took some nice photos and checked the details of my sailing trip. I found out, that we had to confirm our boat passes till 7:00 am, so I packed all my stuff and drove with sleeping Jan next to me to the office where we got our boat passes just in time. 🙂 Sailing trip booked…CHECK ! 🙂 We will start the day after tomorrow at 12:30 pm.

Condor: our sailing boat

This morning I woke up at 9:00 am, noticed that Jan wasn’t there and so I decided to have  breakfast at Mc Donalds.

When I returned to the car, Jan was already waiting for me. We refilled our water bottles, bought some food at Coles/Woolworths and started to Airlie Beach ( 2 hours drive). We arrived at Airlie Beach at about 2:30 pm, we charged all our stuff at a laundry for three hours and tidied up our car.

Then we called some Wwoofers to check whether we could wwoof at their places for a couple of days, but nobody wanted us, so we decided to sleep in the car again. We drove to a secret bay (one guy in Ayr had told us about this bay), we thought we would be all alone over there but we were wrong.:0

 

Airlie Beach: Town of the sailing boats ! Hundreds of boats!

Hundreds of cars were there, too,  and it was really difficult to find a parking lot for our car. :/ We couldn’t even see the bay, because it was already dark, so we decided to watch Ted and fell asleep.

After a really sleepless night I wanted to have my breakfast-toast, but realized, that my cooling bag had been cut, and there was nothing left but the plastic cover of the  toast,  spread all over  the sand. There had been thieves at night! :O But what kind of thieves?

Having thought about it for a while, brooding over what kind of thief would take upon himself to walk 3 km just to steal a package of toast, I came to the conclusion, that the thieves couldn’t have been human beings, it must have been wallabies or oppossums from the island. Curse them! I shouted at the animals, because I couldn’t enjoy my breakfast today. 🙁 That’s pure wildlife ! After that fiasco I washed myself in the little creek, I didn’t want to risk to go into the sea alone because of Stingers. (Jan was still sleeping) At 7:00 am I woke him up, and we started to pack our stuff. We left the tent and some of our clothes behind. :/ Our plans for the day were to drive to Nelly Bay for snorkelling. There is a special snorkelling track -, to walk the Fortes walk and to snorkel at Florence Bay. We thought we could hitchhike all the way, but after one hour waiting on the road, we only got a lift to Nelly Bay.  Down there we decided to hire a scooter for one day.  🙂

It was much fun to ride from one bay to another, and I decided to cancel the Fortes walk because of my sunburn. ( the peeling of my whole face-skin had started  :/ ) Hopefully it will have healed when our Whitsundays trip will start.. :/ The sun wasn’t shining today ( good for me and my sunburn on the one hand but on the other hand it put me in a bad mood.:/ But Jan and I managed the day very well, we went snorkelling, had lunch in Horseshoe Bay, where I published my blog, and where I got back the deposit for hiring the scooter.

 

 

 

 

 

At 5:15 pm we caught the ferry back to Townsville and arrived there at 6:00 pm. All in all it was an exciting trip to Magnetic Island for both of us, we saw beautiful beaches, lovely bays, a lot of fish, hitchhiked four times and had a nice ride on a scooter. 🙂 For dinner we went to the Seaview Hotel in Townsville. I ate „The Strand“ pizza and enjoyed the Sunday nightlife. At 2:00 am we returned to the car and slept in it. 🙂

 

After having woken up this morning we quickly packed our stuff and drove to the ferry to Magnetic Island. We caught it at 10:45 am and arrived on the island around 11:30.

There we went to a roundabout and waited untill somebody gave us a lift. (Had to wait for 1 and a half hour :/) This time it was a nice young man, who had moved to the island two years ago, he was called Steven. He was very friendly and showed us around the island.  He asked where we wanted to go and we just said „Snorkelling please“. Our first stop was at a viewing platform watching  some rock wallabies. I took some photos (first wildlife wallabies in Australia) 

 

 

 

 

 

and we drove to Horseshoe Bay (10 minutes drive).

 

 

 

 

 

 

There we saw a very nice beach and got out of the car.

Steven drove on and Jan went swimming (I couldn’t because of my sunburn 🙁 ) but I started to plan our route around the island (Arthur Bay and Westpoint) and when Jan returned, he accepted my plans. Before we continued our trip I had to buy some snorkel equipment (left mine in Bundaberg :/) but never mind. 🙂 The new one is better. We hitchhiked to Arthur Bay, this time got a lift from a lovely nice lady. 🙂  At Arthur Bay  we had to choose which way to go.

 

1. Option: A track that takes us to a saltwater creek :/

2. Option: A track that takes us to a private house. :/

We chose the first option and bravely passed through the creek ( it wasn’t deep but considering  all our luggage, a little adventure 🙂 )  We succeeded and saw the wonderful Arthur Bay.

 

A really amazing place, surrounded by big rocks and lovely trees, full of birds and wallabies. 🙂  First of all we went snorkelling. See the photos, there wasn’t such a large number of fish as we had expected, because the sea was rough and, on top of that, I happened to cut my foot by touching  a coralreef. The waves had crashed me against the rocks and I started to get scared because I’ve never faced a situation like that before, and Jan  was out of sight, far away :/ ( probably out of the water, because his swimming mask was leaking)

I managed to get out of this frightening situation and, luckily, managed to return from my snorkel-trip  without suffering from severe injuries. 🙂

 

 

 

 

We decided to camp at Arthur Bay because we were too exhausted after having climbed up the rocks :P.

Standing on top of the highest rock I felt like …

As we woke up at Robert’s place (had arrived last night and went to bed early, got sunburn :/ ), we went into his jacuzzi and ate our pancakes in it (had made them by ourselves before we went outside :P) ( https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=226086380897250&saved ) Here some pictures of his house. 😀 Enjoy them 😀

Today we checked out of our hostel and gave a German guy (Mert) a lift to the airport in Townsville (1 hour drive) 🙂

 

 

 

 

In Townsville Jan and I decided to go to the beach called ‚The Strand‘ 🙂 We parked our car and spent the whole day on the beach. 🙂