I forgot to mention how ridiculously expensive Australia is for EVERYTHING - its crazy especially after cheap Asia prices, I will try to list costs of stuff to give you an idea of how shocking it is for us as the dollar is so strong against the £ just now. On a plus note though we can drink water from the taps (a first in 5 months) which is free from water fountains everywhere so at least we can refill our bottles hehe

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 So the rain continued as we headed south to Townsville - not amused !!

Townsville is a much bigger city and we hadn't a clue where to sleep but we noticed one of the hostels has a car park you can pay to park up in and use their facilities so that's what we did . We cooked noodles like we had been eating in Vietnam in the kitchen there and they were DELICIOUS, we chilled out that evening and watched a movie its good to have nothing to do for once.

The next day we were going to go to Magnetic Island but once again the rain was still with us and its cold !!!!! We have been in roasting Asia for 5 months and we are defo not used to the 20c temperatures with wind and rain so we abandoned that idea !!  

We went to Reef HQ instead which is a large coral aquarium - since we have been diving we are getting to know the diff names of the fish that are in the seas so it was cool to recognise some of the fish we had seen when diving in the aquarium. It was great wee day out they had feeding sessions for the fish, we saw tiny seahorses being born, we visited the turtle hospital where they are looking after rescued turtles and releasing them back into the wild and we watched a presentation on jellyfish and dangers in the sea- we figured this could be useful seeing as we just ran into the sea on our first morning and didnt think - we later found out that in a few weeks time we would have been greeted by thousands of bluebottle jellyfish luck for us it wasn't quite in season but when it is you cant swim in the sea !!

We decided to head off after this to try and drive as far as possible before darkwe are heading to the Town of 1770 next but its a good 9 hours away so will see where we end up.


Distance
Mission Beach - Townsville 239km drive time around 2.5 hours
  
Costs
Entry to Reef HQ with our "acquired" student ID - £13 each
Loaf of bread - £2.27
Bottle of 550ml coke from petrol station - £2.33
Bottle of 1 litre water in a shop - £2.20
40g pouch of tobacco - £18
25 pack of cigs - £12