Townsville, Whitsunday Islands and beyond!

Our little cabin at Airlie Beach

We've been staying in Airlie beach for the two last nights, in a petite cabin with non-working wifi, (why is wifi that doesn't work so much more annoying than none at all?!?) on a lovely campsite, in the most amazing location at the edge of the Whitsunday Islands.

Our journey from Townsville took us til teatime, as we wanted to go to the Billabong Koala Sanctuary just outside Townsville first.

The sanctuary actually takes in all kinds of native Australian animals, not just koalas, and has free roaming kangaroos everywhere plus lots of koalas, kangaroos, wombats and turtles and some huge great big what-you-looking-at crocodiles!! The pop those guys jaws make when they take a bite is phenomenal! Some of them were up to 6m long and 500kg!!

We were the very first people in for the day, it was awesome!! The animals were just being fed and we got to help out, though even when it did get busy there were only max 40 people at the place in total, so viewing and holding the animals was great.

One of the kangaroos had a pouch full of baby roo, and every now and then you could see this tiny little hairless face peep out, before it's mummy poked him back in, and then stuck her face in the pouch as if to tell him off!

Both Frey and Ad held a koala, Lissy wasn't tall enough, but she got a good few strokes of one, and introduced it to her cuddly koala she has been clinging to for dear life since we bought it in Sydney. Adam also held, among other reptiles, a baby croc!!

Tuesday saw us up at 5am in Airlie Beach, to get a boat to Whitehaven beach on one of the 74 Whitsunday Islands in the Great Barrier Reef. This 8km beach has the whitest sand in Australia and is voted it's #1 beach, it's not hard to see why! It's pure white up close, super fine and never gets hot and it squeaks when you walk across it!

We all were advised to wear stinger suits to go in the ocean as it is the tailend of stinger season, some of which were more amusing than others! The sea was in beautiful stripes of every shade of turquoise possible, was lovely and warm and we came away sting free :-)

Hammock selfie

After a few hours here, the boat picked us back up and took us to Daydream island, another one in the Whitsundays but the whole island is all one big resort, it wasn't super fancy, but it was really lovely. It had loads for kids, including a living reef with sharks, stingrays etc, 3 life size mermaids in the sea, swimming pools... We had lunch and a drink at the swim up bar and a throughly lush day all together, just what we needed; a rest day.

Finally made it Rockhampton!

So after an evening barbecuing at the campsite, using up several aloe Vera plants worth of gel on a variety of red bits, (despite tonnes of suncream) we are now travelling the dullest bit of Cairns to Brisbane... Airlie Beach to Rockhampton, it's 350 odd miles with not a huge amount to see along the way, but at least there's a pool at the end of it :-)

Ps... Sorry the pics are not great and sideways! Wifi still rubbish at our new place so can't upload from the camera, only got a few iphone pics which for some reason upload to blog sideways!