Whitsundays

After our sojourn in Dunedin we caught a direct flight to Brisbane and then up to Hamilton Island where we boarded the boat for Hayman Island. Noreen decided to start as she meant to go on.

It’s an hour’s journey north – the Whitsunday islands on the left here, the mainland on the right.

We stayed at the fairly luxurious One and Only resort.

Did I mention it was luxurious? This was our modest digs.

Sulphur crested cockatoos abound in the area and were a constant cheeky presence. They can be very destructive if they get in your room and breakfast in the outdoors is an interesting time as the cockatoos come down and take the sugar sachets from the tables. They have learnt to open them neatly and ingest the contents. The other hazard was seagulls swooping down and taking food off your plate. Noreen lost a tasty pastry to a marauding bird.

Cockatoos roosting in a palm tree.

Other better behaved birds included this dusky moorhen. 

I loved the rainbow lorikeets. Unfortunately they dart about quickly high in the canopy so this is the best photo I got. I’m told it’s the haematodus subspecies.

The water lilies were colourful.

One morning we went on an expedition to go snorkelling at Blue Pearl Bay.

It was a lovely experience with the coral starting a few metres off the beach and a varied selection of fishes, clams and coral.

We saw many of these little lizards, some only a few centimetres long.

I walked up to the highest point on the island (about 500m but quite a grunt in the heat) and got this panorama looking toward Hook Island

plus an aerial view of the resort.