Magnetic Island

The alarm went off at 4:50am and it took me a good few minutes to figure out what I was meant to get up for. The temptation to turn it off and go back to sleep was almost to hard to resist but I dragged myself out of bed and got dressed for our hike up Castle Hill (or Machu Picchu 2.0 as we called it) to see the sunrise. It was super steep and there were a LOT of steps. It wasn't the prettiest sunrise we have even seen as it was pretty cloudy however from the Hynes Lookout you get 360 degree views of Townsville and can see all the way across to Magnetic Island. You'd think that we would have been the only people crazy enough to hike up there at silly o'clock in the morning however we were joined by loads of other people. Apparently around 1,500 locals walk, run or cycle up it every day for fitness so the track was pretty busy. We walked up the Cudtheringa Track which was a total of 1,052m and 1,420 steps, however to give our knees (mainly mine) a bit of a rest, we walked back down along the road.

We got back down to the bottom around 7am and having already been up for 2 hours and walked 7km, a coffee was definitely in order. We stopped at a little coffee shop called Fratello and had 2 lattes. I don't know whether it's because I haven't had a cup of coffee in a while or it was genuinely good quality coffee but it was super yummy.

Back at the hostel we had some breakfast and then packed our bags as we are off to Magnetic Island for the weekend. Magnetic Island, or Maggie Island as it's known by the locals, is a 20 minute ferry ride from Townsville. When we arrived on the island, we jumped on the bus to our hostel, YHA Bungalow Bay. We had a nice and lazy afternoon hanging out by the pool and doing some laundry before heading over to Geoffrey Bay around sunset to see the rock wallabies. You can buy Wallaby food to feed them if you want to however we didn't get there before the shop closed. It didn't matter though, lots of other people had put down food and there were quite a few wallabies happily munching away. They are super cute and a couple of them are really friendly. One was sat there quite content while a little boy stroked him and tickled him under his chin. The highlight however was the mummy rock wallaby with a baby joey in her pouch, which as you can imagine was completely adorable!

Once the sun went down we headed back to the hostel for dinner. Whilst we were eating we were joined by a cheeky possum. He was rummaging for scraps under the tables and later on another one shimmied down the side of kitchen and almost climbed on to Simons shoulder before he noticed!Read more