Magnetic Island is our home for the next 3 nights. This island is known as Yunbenun by the Wulgurukaba people, who are the owners of this land. We pay our respects to the Wulgurukaba elders past, present and emerging.
Late this afternoon we hopped off the ferry that brought us across to Magnetic Island and we’re now settling into a really nice Airbnb place down in Picnic Bay. The weather down here is perfect – not too humid, and not too hot. Which makes a lovely change from plenty of rain that we saw up in the Atherton Tablelands over the last couple of days!
We headed off from the Tablelands this morning, after unsuccessfully trying to do one last walk around the rainforest trails near our place. Although it wasn’t raining, the mud on the tracks was just too much – and 10 minutes in, we’d already found a couple of leeches on us. So we had to abandon that plan and head back to the house.
We managed to get to two big things today! The first was at Tully, where you’ll find the Golden Gumboot. Originally a rubber gumboot was awarded to the wettest town in Australia. Over the years, Tully, Innisfail and Babinda have vied for the prize. And so Tully decided to build themselves a giant gumboot to reflect that wettest town prize, but it also keeps track of their cumulative total rainfall each year. Hard to believe their average rainfall per year is 4490mm – that’s a lot of rain.
The second big thing was only half an hour further down the road to the Big Mud Crab. This one was slightly smaller than expected… but still a bit fun. By this stage we were starting to get a bit tight on time, so we only stopped for a quick photo and a toilet break, and then back in the car to Townsville.
We made it to Townsville at about 2:10pm, with about half an hour before we had to start boarding the car ferry across to Magnetic Island. A little tighter on the timing than I would’ve liked, but we made it there fine. And I was glad we still got to stop a few times. But it did mean that lunch had to wait until we got here – so we made a couple of sandwiches while we waited for the ferry to board and enjoyed those. There was a fish tank in the waiting area which the kids had a ball looking at. The ferry trip over was fairly calm, and only takes about 35 minutes of actual sailing – and it was then super quick to get off. After grabbing a few supplies at the IGA in Nelly Bay where the ferry pulls in, we headed the 5 minutes down the road to our place in Picnic Bay.
It’s only a short few minutes walk down the street to the water at the edge of the bay, so we’ll hopefully head down there for a walk and to watch the sunset in a short moment! Really looking forward to exploring Magnetic Island over the next couple of days.
