Back to civilisation and we put our dancing flip flops on 🙂 to check out what the night life in Townsville had to offer. I heard that Townsville is really disappointing and only worth going to to get to Magnetic Island. In fairness though, I really liked it, it’s pretty big, I think the biggest city in Northern Queensland. There’s a real home style, almost cowboy saloon feel to some of the buildings, which I don’t really have pictures of as we had a really big night out…………

 

………and the brain/body were barely functioning the following day. Still though we’d good craic there, even though we were evacuated from the pub just after buying drink, due to a fire in the hotel adjacent. Anyhoo we headed off to the Mad Cow nightclub where it’s all happening. Well actually I think that’s where all the damage was done. We popped outside just after 3am. Queensland has a weird lock down rule so if you literally put a toe on the street, you can’t get back in. Disaster, although the state of us the following day was bad enough without another couple of hours there.

After a very slow and pretty early check out from our hostel, we eventually(!) set off on the ferry for Magnetic Island. It’s a gorgeous place.

 

I know, I know, I say every place is lovely but this is just perfect. We could have rented a 4-wheel drive and trekked around the island but as we are doing so much driving, we opted for a couple of days lazing on the beach, which was just lovely. I’ve decided that I don’t mind lazing by the pool or the beach during the day if I have my ipod. It’s at night I start climb the walls. I think it’s because I don’t have the attention span for tv, movies or books and there’s only so much internet you can handle. I think I must have driven Kate demented as all I did was research the Lonely Planet and find more and more things we could do.

Anyway we have almost booked everything down the coast so it’s kinda scary because it feels like our roadtrip will be over really soon. That said though, then we’ll be in Sydney for Christmas and that will be fantastic too. So it’s Sunday night and we arrived in Airlie Beach a few hours ago. Heading off on a boat to sail the Whitsunday Islands tomorrow. We are going on a dive boat and might even squeeze in a scary shark-filled night dive. I’ve also bought a book which I’m going to attempt to read on board. I may even be relaxed coming back, who knows?

More photos on http://www.flickr.com/photos/lindybear/sets/72157610847406936/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/lindybear/sets/72157610780340239/