Hello again! As a brief interlude to my cattle station job, I'm working on a tropical island helping take care of koalas! I'm on Magnetic Island working at Bungalow Bay Koala Park. On my way over to the island I stopped at the Reef HQ in Townsville. It's quite a cool place, like a gigantic aquarium of the Great Barrier Reef.

 Reef shark

 Funny little spotted shark that will actually walk along the ocean floor with his fins

 Jellyfish or "stingers" as Australians call them

 Can you spot the mud fish? These guys can escape predators by jumping up onto land and staying there for a while

 Some creepy moray eels, not something I want to meet underwater!

 Not sure how this works, but the jellyfish are solar powered

 I wasn't real impressed by the color quality of my camera, but here's some of the different corals

 The mighty sea cow... well, a plastic one anyways

 Anyone hungry for some sea cucumbers?

 Big ray

 Big colorful lobster

 The ray was pretty camera shy for me

 Tiger fish

 Another creepy moray eel

 And a creepy sea snake

 Box Jellyfish aka Sea Wasp aka Fire Medusa aka deadliest jellyfish in the world! Thankfully this one is made of plastic. Fun fact! 12 of these bad boys were netted in the past year in the bay just a 5 minute walk from where I'm staying here on Magnetic Island!

 These turtles are much cuter, and are a sea creature I wouldn't mind seeing in the wild!

 Nemo and Dory!

 Small crocodile

And a barramundi

Godzilla the spider!



And now I'm on a little tropical paradise called Magnetic Island! In the first couple hours of being on the island I saw a wild koala, a wallaby with her joey, a couple lizards, and a bunch of cool little red clawed crabs. Then I had a kookaburra who wanted to get into my little bungalow at night!

 Home sweet home for the next two weeks

 Can't see him very well, but this guy is super cute!!

And here's some pictures of the fellas I'm helping to take care of!

 A few of the lizards

 The blue tongued lizard

 Some smallish crocodiles, the one in the back with his mouth open is one of the salties you hear horror stories about. But, fun fact, statistically the deadliest animal in Australia is actually a horse!

 This is Thor

 Pebbles

And Claudia. Aren't they adorable! And they really are as soft as they look! But I'm told if you tried touching any of the wild ones they have very sharp claws that they aren't afraid to use

 An echidna

 Donovan the python

He's about 6 feet long

 Harry the big fat wombat

Two minutes out in the sun sure tired out Harry, he ran as fast as his fat little legs could carry him straight back to his air-conned house

 Georgie the jungle python, he looks green in shade and yellow in sun! I just thinks he's pretty

 Shadow the black red-tailed cockatoo, can you guess why? Australians aren't very creative with some of their names, haha. He's also the doorbell, whenever someone comes through the gate he squawks to let everyone know.

Here's the kookaburra who hangs out by my bungalow

On a different note, I've had to say good bye to my little Hotel Barina. After a collision with that most murderous of objects- a rock- me and my coworkers did everything we could trying to save her but she finally gave up in a big cloud of smoke. This is my new ride! A little manual Toyota Corolla that is really fun to drive, she's got a sport engine :)

Oof that was a long post! I hope everyone has a very merry Christmas!!