Aquarium and Magnetic Island

 One of the Orientation events was a trip to the Reef HQ museum, which is the largest coral reef aquarium in the world! It was awesome we saw some endangered and exotic animals including Nemo himself! We went behind the scenes and got to see the Sea Turtle hospital, which i absolutely loved, such cute little dudes. It was sad to see all of the diseases and boat strike scars they had. There was also a huge tank with predator fish and sharks-black tipped reef sharks, nurse sharks, and baramundi. I wish I could work at the aquarium, it was so neat.
  So this weekend we went to Magnetic Island, or "Maggie Island" as the Aussies call it. It was the most amazing and beautiful place I have ever seen in my life, the pictures don't even do it justice. We took the ferry over on Friday morning, and checked into our hostel, which surprisingly wasn't rickety and creepy. It was actually the opposite, more like a tiki hut sitting right on the beach. Everyone wanted to go scuba diving so that afternoon we went for a walk on the beach until we found a dive shop-which was closed. Of course. So we thought we'd just go swimming and snorkeling on the beach in front of the shop. It happened to be low tide, which was amazing because like 55 feet of the beach was exposed. Half of us went snorkeling and the rest scoured the beach for treasures. So much was exposed, there were neat corals, shells, worms, and crabs. It's stinger season, so we couldn't go in the 90 degree water without a wetsuit on without the jellies attacking. Snorkeling was amazing I saw corals feeding with all of their polyps out, and sting rays, and some pink jelly fish- which I quickly swam away from. A lot of the corals were broken or bleached, because of the cyclone which was really sad.
  After that we had some food at a random hostel and took a bus back to ours. When we arrived to our surprise it was a huge party, apparently it was a full moon that night, and that calls for a party on Maggie. We had randomly picked the night that the party was happening and stayed at the hostel where it was being held. Whoops!
 The next morning, after a sticky gross night and raging thunderstorms, we checked out and left for our next adventure. We were planning on searching for a secluded pristine beach. We knew it was a 4k hike so we were prepared for a long hike into the beach. Well 3 hours later we still hadn't found it and realized we had gone the wrong way. Oh well, we ended up finding an old WW 2 fort and gun posts. We hiked to the top of a huge hill and found the most amazing views I have ever seen. It was just gorgeous.