Magnetized

I'm going to skip over the middle of last week and get right to our trip to Magnetic Island. A quick rundown, though, for the truly obses--er, interested:

• Natalie arrived Monday afternoon.
• Tuesday we bought things at a nearby shopping center called Stockland. The two main stores are Big W, a Walmart knockoff or franchise, and Kmart. It was here that I began to think that I was cheating the study abroad process, just a little bit. I mean, a mall?
• Tuesday night we went to dinner and we were waited on by another JCU student. One thing I learned: there is such a thing as too much smoked fish. The smoked salmon pasta was good, but there was an awful lot of it.
• Wednesday we bought bikes and rode home (on the street!). Townsville has lots of bike lanes.
• Thursday was boring.

And that brings us to Friday and our trip to Magnetic Island. It's located about 8 km off the shore and takes about 20 minutes by ferry to reach. Once there, (Mom, don't have a heart attack, please, no one died) we rented scooters.

I didn't sit like that the whole time, though, or my spine would have exploded or something. Anyway, we rode around for a while. Natalie had some trouble adjusting to driving on the left side of the road; I had to yell at least three times for her to get off the right side. The scooters could go up to 60 km/hr, but we never really got them above 40.

Our first real stop was at a hike called "The Forts." It's supposed to be the best place on the island to spot koalas, but we went at noon, which prime koala-sleeping-time. Oops. It's also almost entirely uphill. At the top there are excellent views of the island and surrounding area, as well as the remains of a WWII Army base.

After a quick lunch, we set out to do some snorkeling. The first stop was Geoffrey Bay, where the tide was out and the beach completely deserted. It was terrifying, so no actual snorkeling got done. So we hightailed it over to Arthur Bay, which was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. There was a reef, and within two minutes of getting in the water, some sort of ray (update: blue-spotted fantail) appeared. We swam among schools of brilliantly colored fish and oddly shaped coral. The water was cold, not Lake Superior-cold, but cold enough so that it got uncomfortable after about a half hour. It was, really, the perfect way to end the day. So perfect, in fact, that we missed the 4:45 ferry back to Townsville and had to hang around until 6:15, which meant missing dinner at St. Mark's (oh, what a shame). But even that was ok, because we went to a grocery store. We found Thai food for dinner in Townsville, and headed back. Good day.