EZTrip.com International Destination Guide and Hotel Listings

On the east coast, north of Picnic Bay, NELLY BAY is simply a sprawl of houses fronted by a good beach with a little reef some way out. Two streets back is a shopping complex with a supermarket, Mexican restaurant and coffee shop, and just around the corner is an aquarium (daily 9am-5pm; $3), which has tanks of giant clams and a few reef fish - all part of a research project and only open to the public as an afterthought. Bushwalkers with permission from Picnic Bay's NPWS office can follow the difficult trail up Mount Cook from the end of Mandalay Avenue. Forest blocks the view, but take a pen and you can add your name to the list in the metal cylinder left there for the purpose.

A little further along the coast, ARCADIA surrounds Geoffrey Bay and counts the good-value Bannister's Seafood Restaurant among its attractions - their fish and chips are one of the culinary highlights of the island. Alma Bay is a perfect swimming beach hemmed in by cliffs and boulders, and there's good snorkelling over the coral, just offshore. Diving here (through the Arcadia Hotel Resort ) is marred by low visibility, but there are plenty of fish and brain coral, and a disintegrating shipwreck . A walking track from the end of Cook Road leads towards Mount Cook and the track to Nelly Bay, or up to Sphinx Lookout for sea views. At dawn or dusk you might see the diminutive island rock wallaby on an outcrop or boulder near Arcadia's jetty.

North of Arcadia the road forks, with the right branch leading to Radical Bay - impassable to conventional vehicles - and the main road carrying on to Horseshoe. Leave your car at the junction and continue uphill on foot to the Forts , built during World War II to protect Townsville from attack by the Japanese. The walking track climbs gently for about 1.5km through gum-tree scenery to gun emplacements (now just deserted blockhouses) set one above the other among granite boulders and pine trees. Best views are from the slit windows at the command centre, right at the pinnacle of the hill. The woods below the Forts are the best place to see koalas , introduced to the island in 1930. They sleep during the day, so tracking them down involves plenty of wandering around - although if you hear ferocious pig-like grunts and squeals, then some lively koalas are not far away.