Trip

3/1/02 In The Caravan, OZ

3/1/02 In The Caravan, OZ (Kelly)

For some reason I thought it was leap year this year...but apparently I'm wrong (only the 2nd time in my life!!)

Today turned out to be the biggest waste of time ever--I may as well scratch it out of my records--everything went wrong...all we could do was laugh!!

We drove from Airlie Beach to Townsville, only about a 2 hour drive. I'm blaming this on Phillip (It was his idea!!) He wanted to go to Magnetic Island, right off the coast of Townsville. Okay, fine! We arrived at the ferry 2 minutes before it was supposed to leave. Because we were in a rush we sort of got on the wrong one. We boarded (and paid for) the ferry that is mainly for cars (tourists bringing their cars over to the island.) We were the only "walking" passengers on the boat. I didn't mind so much except the barge docked in the middle of nowhere on the island and we had to walk about 20 minutes to sit down. We should have taken the "real" passenger ferry that dropped off in the center of the island where buses and taxis were waiting. After we ate lunch we wanted to go snorkeling...no can do! It was low tide when we arrived and the bay that we went to had a spectacular reef but the water was knee high! We couldn't even go swimming because there are a high number of deadly jellyfish that are very prominent this time of year. If stung they kill you within 3 minutes. We then thought we would walk to the main area of the island. "Negative ghost rider, the pattern is full!" (quote from 'Top Gun') Town wound up being about 9 km away. About a third of the way there we caught a bus. By this time it was about 3:45 and our boat was leaving at 6:10 back to the main land. Swell, we had a couple of hours to lay on the beach...this was a no go as well considering the last bus that we could catch to make our boat in time was in 20 minutes. So what did we do...went down to the beach, took a quick dip (we were drenched with sweat from walking), and turned around to get back on the bus. Of course, these bus rides were not free! Screw ball it--we caught the bus back to the nearest hostel to our port and hung out in the pool! Once we did get back to Townsville we were so fed up with the day that we didn't even want to sleep there...we drove an hour north to Ingham to stay the night!