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Published: November 16th 2008
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Hey everyone
Once again sorry for the lack of contact but Oz has very temperamental Internet both in the fact that its sometimes hard to find and also once you get online the Internet doesn't always stay connected, also my laptop decided to pack up and at the same time the memory card for my camera broke and it wiped all the photos!! Luckily i had backed all of them up on my laptop otherwise i would have lost everything which would have been devastating. Anyway Magnetic Island, i didn't know a great deal about the island before i got there and to be honest i don't really know much more now, the island is one of the only places in Oz you can see wild koalas which i did, there's one specific area on the island to see them which is in Arcadia along the forts walk, so on Thursday i caught a local bus up there and within 5 minutes i had seen my first Koala :-) It was a female with a baby in her pouch-yup koalas have pouches too in fact there's a few animals in Oz with pouches not just Kangaroos including possums, wombats and
Male Koala
I think i woke him up Bandicoots, koalas are really docile animals and i managed to get really close to it but someone had informed me that almost all wild koalas have chlamydia so i didn't really want to risk it, i later found out that they have it because some bright spark wanted to reduce the numbers of koalas on a island in the north so he injected all the females with chlamydia to make them infertile which worked then the same person thought it would be clever to release half of the infected koalas on the mainland and the disease spread through almost every koala in Oz. Not only do koalas have to deal with chlamydia but the main cause of death in koalas is starvation because they only have one set of teeth and over several years of eating eucalyptus there teeth wear down so much they can't chew anymore so they starve! Further down the path i saw another Koala but this time it was a male, there was meant to be another male further down but i couldn't find it anywhere because there surprisingly camouflaged. After doing the forts walk i caught the bus a little further down the road to
Horseshoe Bay which had a beautiful beach so i spent the rest of afternoon there just relaxing
On Friday it was the full moon party, which was at the hostel i was staying at but they were fully booked for that night so i had to move hostels to one about 20 mins away, the party didn't start until about 10pm so i went back to Horseshoe Bay to Bungalow Bay Koala sanctuary, at Bungalow Bay you could hold snakes, Crocs and a koala, it was brilliant and the guide told us so much about all the animals, i also got to hold a really rare black cockatoo that cost over $125,000 USD! And i fed it by putting a sunflower seed between my lips and it took it out of my mouth which was odd but i got a good photo, the koala i held was called Dexter and he has his own Facebook profile-
apparently the koalas are only allowed to 'work' for 13 mins a week by law which sounds like a pretty good job to me and they seem to love being cuddled. On the way out of the sanctuary there were people feeding some Koala
Can you see the Koala? birds called rainbow parakeets which are beautiful and when i tried to feed one before i knew it i had about 20 on my arms, shoulders and even my head. I then went back to the hostel and got some food and waited until about half 9 before i headed off to the Full Moon Party. The party had been run by Base Backpackers since 2004 and it was held every month on the night of the full moon, there were top DJs playing and there was an amazing atmosphere but they really overcharged for drinks and they weren't letting anyone on the beach which was right next to the hostel but i still had a really good night.
All in all i really liked magnetic island but there wasn't really a gret deal to do there unless you wanted to fork out a lot of money, i would have taken more photo's but like i said my memory card for my camera has broke so most of the photos you see were taken on a lad i mets camera.
Anyway next stop Airlie Beach which is about 4 and a half hours drive from Magnetic i'll let you know
Close enough
This is how close i was to the female Koala how it goes when i next get online
Take Care
Alex
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