Mission Beach - Magnetic Island (QLD Trip)

April 8, 2006. The day starts again with an early wake-up, getting ready for leaving our nice accomodation in Mission Beach and for proceeding our trip towards Magnetic Island.

The weather is tropical, again really warm but as the pictures show also pretty humid.

But the misquitos seem to like that weather. Their activity is obvious after a 5 minute walk through the above fauna resulting in ca. 15 bites along my legs.

The following picture shows "The Golden Gumboot".

The Golden Gumboot is a competition between the neighbouring QLD towns of Tully and Babinda for the wettest town of Australia. These towns exist in the Wet Tropics and on land that was previously covered by rainforest. These areas experience some of the highest level of rainfall in Australia through monsoonal rain and cyclones. The winner for the competition (since 1970) was awarded with a rubber boot.
The giant boot in Tully stands at 7.9 metres and represents the record rainfall for the village in 1950. And crazy as the people are over there Tully holds a Golden Gumboot Festival annually. I think in the middle of nowhere there is simply nothing else to do...

Shortly after noon and still with bad weather we reach Townsville......from where we take the ferry to 8 km distant Magnetic Island after lunch and only a short rest.

Magnetic Island got its name from James Cook - who discovered Australia - and whose compass and all other navigation instruments stopped working when arriving for the first time in Townsville. He believed a magnetic field around the island to be responsible for this phenomenon.

What awaits us upon arrival is an amazing accomodation in backpacker resort style...

...located directly on the beach...

...and with pool.

Still having the whole afternoon to pass, kayaking is on the activity programme:

The great day is well-rounded first with a nice dinner and some drinks at the bar. For later games like limbo, karaoke and the one shown on the below picture have been organised. Here 6 people of a team have to form a human pyramid with the person on top blowing up a balloon, winning the quickest. Well, though Melanie's balloon escaped we still won :-)

Another "highlight" of the evening were my 3 successfully won pool games (out of 3) against Henk who had to buy me one drink for every lost game and vice versa :-)