Friday 17th October - Maggie Island to Airlie Beach

After spending the day in the car on Monday, me and Sinead caught the boat over to Townsville on Tuesday to do a bit of shopping. The centre of Townsville to be honest wasn't that great. There was just a handfull of shops, and that was it. Went to a tourist information point to see what else there was to do and we were told that there were other shopping centres. Managed to catch a but and head out to one of these shopping centres, and to be honest it was much better than Townsville centre. We spent a few hours there, before heading back to the centre. In the centre we met up with Bethan and Elin, and had a chat with them before heading back over to Maggie Island on the boat, for an evening of drinking and eating.

Didn't leave the hostel on Wednesday at all. Spent my time on the internet booking flights to Melbourne for December (managed to get a return for 78 quid), and looking at hostels. Also spent time on the beach that's pretty much attached to the hostel just chilling and watching the divers do their course. Maggie and Chris are 2 of these divers. It was a bit worrying though, there was a croc that had made it's way into one of the bays on Maggie Island. It was just round the corner from where we were staying. It was quite big news in the area, and there were people keeping an eye on it, making sure it didn't get any closer into the bay. If it did that they were going to attempt to push it back out into the sea. The croc hadn't moved by the time that me and Sinead left, but Maggie sent me a message earlier saying her diving course had to be stopped on Thursday because the croc had moved into where they were diving, which was the bay I had been staying in.

We had to check out of base on Thursday, catch the boat over to Townsville, ready to catch the Oz Experience bus to take us to Airlie Beach. The bus journey took about 4 hours. I'm not looking forward to the next one though, it takes around 10 hours!! We checked into the Beaches hostel at Airlie Beach, and it's got a pretty good bar underneath. Me and Sinead and a few other we'd met went down for a few drinks, but then had quite an early night. So far today we haven't done too much. We got a bus out to the supermarket to stock up on some food, and that's about it. There doesn't seem to be much to do on Airlie Beach, so we will probably be moving on pretty quickly after the 2 day boat trip that we are doing Saturday til Monday.