Whitsunday Clouds

There was only one cloud over our time in Phuket, and it had nothing whatever to do with Phuket.

Because we decided so late that we could actually go on Leg 3, we had no accommodation researched or arranged anywhere - we have to do all that as we go along. So whilst sitting by the pool in Phuket, we tried to find and book good accommodation in Sydney (very successfully), The Whitsundays (see below) and Fiji (a story for another day, which Clare introduced in the last post).

I read TripAdvisor reviews of every resort in the Whitsunday Islands. We feel we've acquired a reasonable skill in interpreting reviews by now, and I concentrate on 2* and 4* reviews - people for whom everything wasn't either all right or all wrong. Normally different views on the same shortcomings emerge, allowing you to apply your own weighting for what matters to you.

Having gone through that process for every Whitsundays resort, there didn't seem any that seemed a safe bet for our precious one-off experience - mostly rip-offs (beyond a reasonable "exclusive" premium) and/or awful service/attitude. Some of the reviews were a few years old, though.

We turned to Airlie Beach (the bit of the mainland that faces the Whitsunday Islands) and found a much more normal selection of hotels and reviews. Unfortunately, location seemed to be a problem for a lot of places. Some were a long walk up a hill. A couple of the most promising turned out to have a big land reclamation project going on in front of them.

Quite dismayed by now, we considered splitting our time between two places. The trouble is that both of us find "travel days" complete wipe-outs in terms of relaxation, so we gave up on that.

In the end we crossed our fingers and booked one resort, hoping the reviews had been unnecessarily jaundiced.

Hamilton Island is the largest occupied/resort island in the Whitsunday Islands, and the site of the Great Barrier Reef Airport. The whole island is on lease from the Oz government to Robert Oatley.

He's built three resorts (expensive, ouch and you-what???), plus various apartments and a marina area with various restaurants. There are shuttle buses around the island and you can charge to your room (almost) anywhere on the island by showing your key.

We landed and were swiftly installed in the Reef View Hotel (expensive) in a beautiful 15th-floor room with king sized bed and whole-glass-wall view across the bay and other islands. Not dirty at all, and certainly not in need of refurbishment.

Downstairs for dinner, we found £16 starters, £23 mains and £5 bottles of beer. We'd read a review warning to expect bills of £130 for a meal for two, and that's pretty much what we found - we feared we'd probably end up paying as much on food as the cost of the room.

However, those turned out to be the most expensive prices on the island apart from a couple of fine dining restaurants at the marina, so the non-accommodation costs eventually came to about 60% of the room, which isn't so unusual.

In any case, we'd found that Sydney was unusually expensive, so things aren't all that much higher here.

The other thing that bears saying, relative to the reviews of the hotel/island as that we found every single member of staff friendly, polite and very helpful. We'll be submitting a review of our own to try to correct the story.

Did I say view of the bay? Well, actually when we arrived there was quite low cloud, which closed in until we could see hardly anything out of the window - that'll teach us to bank on Aussie winter weather!

In fact, the weather forecast for the whole week involved clouds and some rain. Days 1-3 had a solid overcast with overnight rain, and on days 4 and 5 the rain intruded a little into the daytime.

We're not complaining. We've "won" everywhere else we've been this year - typical: "last week was really bad", so we can hardly complain when our luck ebbs slightly. In a strange way, it made the lovely place even more relaxing.

We did ask about a day trip to snorkel on the Barrier Reef, but apparently the wind was too high and looked set to stay that way for our whole week.

Day 6 was brighter, with maybe half an hour of the sun peeping through the clouds, which we celebrated by sitting beside a beachfront pool for the first time. In the afternoon I sailed Clare round the bay in a small catamaran. This was a little outside Clare's comfort zone, but she did end up enjoying it.

Our package included an afternoon boat trip to famous Whitehaven Beach on uninhabited Whitsunday Island. It became our daily ritual to wake, look out of the window, and re-book the trip for the following day whilst on our way to breakfast.

In the end, we reached day 7, our last full day, and had to go. It turned out to be the best day - a reasonable temperature and quite a few glimpses of the sun through the clouds. Whitehaven Beach is worthy of its reputation - a graceful 7km arc of pure, floury, white silica sand. Gorgeous!