A word of advice to all sleep-loving campers: do not pitch your tent at the end of the campground nearest the bar. After an evening flayed by mega-decibel music followed by piercing conversations, and a night featuring the squabblings of possums and wails of bush stone-curlews, Vilis and I rose groggily from our sleeping bags this morning and, before hiring snorkelling gear, moved our tent to the opposite extremity of the campground. Lethargically and carrying bright green and blue flippers, we hiked from Bungalow Bay Resort uphill to the junction with The Forts track (which we planned to bushwalk in late afternoon in search of koalas) and then downhill toward Radical Bay. A couple of locals offered us a ride near Arthur’s Bay and informed us that a Scrabble tournament involving No. 2 in Australia and several top Queensland players was currently underway in a beach house by the bay, our driver having cooked a meal for the Scrabble gang and then escaped the house for some R & R at  the beach.

Having only snorkelled once before in a sheltered cove at Goat Island Marine Reserve in New Zealand, our first attempt in Australia was a matter of being slammed by waves and peering fruitlessly into sand-ridden, green water. With the wind up, the bay was rougher than we expected, shoving us toward oyster- and mussel-encrusted rocks rather than allowing us to paddle serenely and enjoy the complex beauty of a tropical coral reef.

We abandoned the battle at Radical Bay and walked the road south to Florence Bay. There, in gentler waves and shallow water roiling with sand, we caught our first glimpses of a fringing coral reef and swam over beds of coral partially obscured by grit swirling in the water. The reef teamed with algae, corals, and other sedentary marine life. Vilis ventured farther out than I did (I had difficulty maintaining a good seal on my mask) and spotted a colourful reef fish, which added to our excitement. In early afternoon, we left the bay, chilled by the cool water which nonetheless allowed us the freedom of the ocean without worrying about being stung by box jellyfish or irukandji. These marine stingers with their life-threatening toxins terrorize Queenslanders from November through June, but are unable to survive in winter waters.

From Florence Bay, we hiked south along the road, popping onto Arthur’s Bay beach for a brief look at another of Magnetic Island’s secluded beaches guarded by rocky headlands. With the exception of Horseshoe Bay, the island’s northern beaches are relatively small, their deeply curving crescents of sand and enticing green water exuding a far more intimate air than the long sweeps of Townsville’s Strand and Pallarenda Beach.

In late afternoon, we exchanged our reef search images for those of koalas. As we hiked The Forts track, we craned our necks to look up into the canopies of poplar gums and ironbarks, hoping to spot grey lumps lodged in crotches of branches. Disheartened at missing two koalas seen by other hikers, we completed The Forts circuit and climbed ladders to the top of the Port War Signal Station, which during the second half of World War II provided early warning capabilities to the military command centre in Townsville. Other abandoned military structures peppered the wooded, rock-studded hill, one being a gun station that offered a 360° firing range.

While descending the steep slope below the war signal station, we finally recorded our first koala in the wild when I spotted a large adult resting on its hard rump pad in a branch crotch of an ironbark. The koala stared down at us, stretched a hind leg nonchalantly, then pulled itself hand over hand higher into the tree to feed on gum leaves. It appeared squinty-eyed, its nose pad black and curving, its grey, white-dappled  body fur short and dense in comparison with its endearingly furry ears. With the light waning, we continued down the track and spotted another koala dozing on a tree branch directly over the trail, the track littered with its oval, greenish-brown scats and the site marked with a pile of sticks to alert koala-searchers to its presence.

Again, we ate our supper surrounded by young world travellers who made us think of times gone by, and again we slid into our sleeping bags early, but this night, we had quiet.

Today’s fauna: helmeted friarbird, magpie geese, Pacific black ducks, purple swamphen, agile wallaby, pied currawongs, rainbow bee-eaters, rainbow lorikeets, blue tigers, intertidal and *coral reef life, white-bellied sea eagle, yellow-bellied sunbird, wedge-tailed eagle, leaden flycatcher (m), *koalas. (*indicates lifelist sighting)