Magnetic Island - freedom, sunshine, sand and koalas!!!

Our original plan had been to chill out for a few days and then to go to a wwoof host on the island, but that all fell apart a bit (it's becoming a sort of theme of our wwoofing organising!) when this host had to cancel for family reasons. Fine, so we would chill out for five days, and then go to our next host near Mackay. Nope - these had to cancel too. Cue a day of frantic panicking and emailing, until we suddenly recieved a response from a vineyard near Childers asking if we could come on the dates we had been meant to go to our Mackay host. Ace, and it sounded like a lovely place, more to the point! And so what if it was...gulp... a sixteen hour bus ride away.

Putting such thoughts aside we settled down to enjoy our time on the island properly. This mostly involved either relaxing on the beach at Picnic Bay, the quiet (a whole lot quieter since the ferry terminal moved to Nelly Bay) township at the end of the island's paved road, wandering the jetty there, or catching the bus to explore other beaches on the island. The first day we were there we were lucky enough to see a turtle, just swimming in the sea next to the jetty - I didn't even get to see one of them when I was diving! We visited Arcadia to relax on the beach and pose by the sign (there's an Arcadia at Glastonbury festival, the sign of which we also have photos posing by... anyway).

But on our second-last day our mission was Koala Spotting! This required doing the Forts walk on the other side of the island, in the cool afternoon when the koalas, who sleep about 20 hours out of 24 due to their energy-low eucalyptus leaf diet, are most active (active may be a strong word). So before hand we took another walk which branched off the Forts track, walking in the midday heat and then relaxing with a picnic lunch at Florence Bay, an almost unbearably picturesque bay fringed by rocky cliffs. Then we took a short, slightly muddy walk through a stand of mangroves to Arthur Bay, an even more pretty bay, with a rocky outcrop on which perched, as if placed there by the tourist office, a little rock wallaby.

When the day finally began to cool down, we walked back up the hill to the start of the Forts trail, which weaves up a ridge through eucalyptus forest, passing through the site of an old WWII military encampment. The track finishes at the top of a rise, where the observation post and controls post, along with gun emplacements, still remain. It was fascinating to think of the troops stationed there balanced the mental pressures of being constantly battle-ready (though they neve fired a shot in anger, only in, as the info board put it, 'mild surprise', at an American ship paying an unexpected visit!), yet living in such a lush tropical environment.

And, yes, we were also fascinated by the koalas! Starting out the walk I expected to see one at best, they're famously hard to see when asleep - the guidebook described them as 'motionless grey bundles', a surprisingly hard thing to see in a forest of trees. The first two were saw were pointed out to us by other walkers - one, living up to the guidebooks description perfectly, was nestled in the crook of a tree, sound asleep - though this didn't damped our excitement at seeing it one bit. The next one actually stirred, probably roused by our (ok, just my) hissed 'Look, look, a koala', gave us a sleepy, slightly baleful look out of it's round, grey, furry face, and promptly settled back to sleep. The best koala sighting though was definitely when we were tipped off by a family coming up the track as we came down that a mother and baby had been seen, wide awake, in a tree on one of the side paths. It was adorable - the mother lazily reaching out for pawfuls of eucalyptus leaves as the baby, clinging on tightly to it's mum, gazed down at us curiously. We stared enraptured for about ten minutes before deciding to leave them in peace. And, finally, on the last stage of the track before the carpark and bustop, we saw a koala in action, moving more than a few languid millimetres and actually clambering up a tree. We were buzzing for hours - in fact I still am a bit - to see them actually in the wild, and going about their business careless of the dumb people staring at them.

written by  LizIsHere on July 23, 2010 from Magnetic Island, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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