The Whitsunday Islands – Hamilton Island

The day at sea following Brisbane went by so quickly, I couldn't account for my time.  Between attending enrichment lectures, cooking demonstrations, walking laps on the upper deck and eating gourmet meals the day gently slipped away.    I worked some on this blog but did not finish.

Friday we awoke to an island view.  We were anchored in the Whitsunday Islands, discovered by Captain Cook.  Captain Cook appears to have named a lot of the real estate he discovered for the date he thought he discovered it.  The Thursday Islands come later in this trip.

The cruise line had scheduled this stop to enable "guests", i.e. passengers, at $300 each to take a tour to a pontoon anchored in the Great Barrier Reef.  There they could snorkel or view the reef life from a glass bottomed boat.  We decided to pass on the tour and went to Hamilton Island for the morning. 

Hamilton Island is a large privately owned resort.  Michael and I took a free shuttle bus tour which sounded remarkably like a real estate pitch.  Part of the attraction of the place is that since it is privately owned, there is no police force, just private security.  There is allegedly no crime. I'm not sure whether or not the guide was suggesting that residents can do drugs or engage in otherwise illegal activities as long as it's discrete.  We got off and walked around.  We stopped at some of the hotels, some beautiful swimming pools, over priced tourist shops and a restaurant that featured breakfast with koalas for an additional $20 apiece.  The koalas were hidden behind solid wooden fencing.    All the good stuff cost extra. In little more than an hour we had seen all there was to see and it was back to the ship for lunch.

We returned just in time as it rained most of the afternoon.  The ship got underway at 1:00 p.m. to go out to the reef to pick up the 100 or so "guests" that had taken the reef tour.  When they reboarded around 3:00 p.m. we heard a lot of complaining about the seeing conditions at the pontoon not being that good.  In addition, they got rained on!