When you’re travelling along the East Coast of Australia, there are a lot of famous places to visit. The beautiful Whitsunday Islands or Fraser Island, Great Barrier Reef or the Blue Mountains.
But there are also a few options along the way that aren’t that well known, but are worth your time nonetheless. One of these is Magnetic Island.
Magnetic Island is a decent sized island off the coast of Townsville, Queensland. Whether you’d call it a small or a large island kinda depends on your reference. Let’s just say that you can explore it for a few days without getting bored. Does that put it into perspective?
If you’re a backpacker, there are pretty much 2 hostels you can choose from.
And you’d better choose wisely! BASE is a lively, beach-side party place, where they have fun, games, good food and plenty of alcohol. They also have a regular full-moon party.
YHA is located on the other side of the island, without a beach but with a Koala sanctuary and a very relaxed, down to earth atmosphere.
I stayed in BASE, just because it happened to work out that way. If you do stay there, I have one tip for you: don’t walk there from the ferry terminal. It’s a lot further than you’d think. Take the bus. Really, take it!
Magnetic Island has a lot of beautiful places.
There are gorgeous beaches, impressive mountains and cute animals all around. You can also go diving, hiking or fishing: whatever you like!
The most impressive beach can be found in Horseshoe Bay.
Due to the frequent presence of Box Jellyfish in the area, a few sections of water are sectioned off with stinger nets, so you can still swim safely.
If you really want to explore the island, I’d recommend renting a 4×4 car.
You can also rent bicycles or barbie cars, but the bicycles are mostly crap and the barbie cars are definitely not suitable for half of the terrain of the island.
You could also take public transportation, but that doesn’t allow you to see the more majestic places of the island.
My number one recommendation would be to drive up to West Point to watch the sunset.
The road to get there doesn’t justify the title ‘road’ and if you see a ‘DIP’ sign be aware: they are big dips and there are plenty of them! (As the people in the back of my car can attest to, I kinda miscalculated the first few… Sorry about that guys!)
It was all forgotten once we got to our destination.
Even without any clear skies it was gorgeous! There was an eagle flying around hunting, ignoring all of us eyeing it. We couldn’t see the sun and didn’t really see it set either, but the sight was still amazing!
There’s loads more to do on Magnetic Island
Things such as visiting the Koala Sanctuary and feeding the wallabies in the harbor. But I’ll get back to those in a separate post. For now all you have to remember is: if you’re in the area, go to Magnetic Island 🙂
