Arrived In Magnetic Island, Australia

We've had enough of the rain and left Cairns this morning in search of sunshine. We took the Greyhound coach  around 6 hours south of Cairns to Townsville where we could catch a ferry to Magnetic Island. On the way down we stopped off in Cardwell for a lunch break and got to see some of the damage from the recent Cyclone Yasi. Most of the way down from Cairns you could see damage such as buildings' roofs ripped off and strewn down the road and flattened rainforest. The driver of our coach gave us a bit of commentary on the way down, and was saying that part of the rainforest near Cardwell was so dense you could only see about two metres into it, but now it is completely flattened, even the leaves and branches have been ripped off the trees that were still standing.

In Cardwell many of the buildings, including people's homes, were totally destroyed. The cyclone stretched several hundred kilometres along the east coast from Cairns to south of Townsville, with the eye of the storm tearing straight through Cardwell. Some of the buildings in the town were 50 years old and had stood up to years of storms and cyclones, but had been flattened by Yasi.

By the time we got to Townsville the sun was shining with a small amount of cloud, which was so nice to see! The ferry left about 30 minutes after our Greyhound coach giving us just enough time to sort out the tickets and our accommodation on the island. We chose somewhere on the recommendation of Rich & Sara (who we met at our hostel in Cairns), that to our surprise came with a free collection service from the ferry terminal in a classic Rolls Royce Silver Shadow!

A lot of the island is best explored by 4x4 because many of the roads are dusty tracks, so after having dropped our bags off to our room we hired a Suzuki Vitara 4x4 to go for a drive. Apparently you can sometimes see wild koalas along a stretch of track heading north, though we didn't see any this time so we are going to go for another drive there in the morning.

Geoffery Bay, the beach opposite our guest house, is famous for its wallabys that visit the rocks near the shore at dusk. Our resort kindly gave us some wallaby pellets and said that quite often they will eat out of your hand! They were surprisingly tame and friendly, when you hold your hand out with food it would gently lick it off your palm.