1995/11 Australia trip - Magnetic Island |
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After all this, we ended up getting to Townsville after dark. Unfortunately, the map in the camping book was garbage, and we spent 
an hour driving up and down looking for the intersection of two roads that never met in reality. In the end, I happened to spot a signpost to an area with the same name as the campground and we eventually found it. The Aussies don’t seem to be all that strong on maps and signs and directions. Maybe they all really want to go back to England but can’t find their way?
It turned out to be a reasonable site with a view across the bay to Magnetic Island, which is where we were going to spend most of Monday. We took 
the catamaran ferry over to the island. This was easily the fastest boat I have ever been on. Once out of the harbour, it let fire with its twin engines, up came the bow, and it planed across the sea like a speedboat.
We hadn’t taken the camper across as it wasn’t worth it for a few hours, but the island is about 5 miles square and very hilly, so we rented a mini-moke which is like a little jeep. Sandie drove while I took pictures. She said it was like driving a tractor. However, with a kangaroo clutch, hair trigger accelerator, dead brakes, and a gearbox that would go into first in preference to third, it was an exciting ride. It’s lucky I wear glasses or we’d have wasted time looking for my eyeballs. Somehow we got around the island and partway up the mountain. 
There’s a trail up to the forts they built in WWII to repel the Japanese, and we trudged up this, slowly as it was definitely a tropical morning: instant burn. We’d been warned to look out for bears and halfway up, we saw a mama and baby koala bear. Mama was comfortably asleep in the fork of a gum tree, but the baby was clutching the tree and watching us. We used a lot of film.
We continued up the top, ignoring the side trails off to the historic 1944 latrines, and climbed up to the old gun emplacements and signal towers. Some beautiful views of the island’s bays, though I doubt that the soldiers appreciated them. On the way back down, the baby was now asleep and mama keeping an eye on us. After lunch at one of the resorts, we drove down to one of those bays and cooled our feet off, but then it was one of our usual nail-biting drives back to catch the last ferry.
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Magnetic Island (17.50) |
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Then, we had a couple of hundred miles to do to get to Cairns for the night. The road goes through a sparsely populated area. Wherever there’s flat dry land, it’s been cultivated to grow sugar cane, and there are a few towns grown up around the sugar refineries, but these are 40 miles apart. The rest of the land is rain forest, a lot of it now part of the world heritage area.
It was tempting to pull off at one of the rain forest parks, but there were three things we definitely wanted to do in Cairns, so we had to be there for the Monday night. However, it’s a big place, and we didn’t want a repeat of the Townsville search, so I found a site out of town, next door to Barron Gorge national park. The area was inky black, but we found it OK. Luckily, most of these places have a night bell for people like us, and the owner turned out to be really helpful, which was nice as we intended to stay three whole nights there.