The insiders guide to Australia: tropical islands

Sitting at my computer for the last three weeks I've started to miss travelling. As an editor and writer for a local environmental newspaper, life can get busy, which means travel can be overlooked. After a long day writing I was exhausted and started to day-dream about a trip I took a year or so ago. A trip to Australia's tropical north. My screensaver has a collection of tropical islands and whilst gazing at one particularly pretty scene, my mind wandered back to an island off the Queensland coast ...

Looking out over the calm waters it’s easy to imagine the original inhabitants, the Ngaro people, paddling canoes and fishing. Islands, like drowned mountain ranges in every direction. The warm tropical waters of the Coral Sea gently shift and sweep the white sands. Dense forests sometimes overhang the ocean and as the tide falls, the corals are exposed once more.

As the sea-breeze strengthened in the afternoon I could imagine the sight of the first square sails, and underneath them, the first Europeans. Lieutenant James Cook and his crew, onboard the HM Bark Endeavour, slowly making their way north through the confines of the Great Barrier Reef.

This is a place where it’s easy to get lost in thought and imagination.

Sometimes described as “the Greek Islands, Downunder”, the Whitsunday group of islands is one section of a stunning arrangement of 900 islands that make up Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Named after the day they were first recorded by the British (Whit Sunday, June 3, 1770), the Whitsunday’s now contain some of Australia’s leading island resorts.

With the reef stretching for more than 2000 km, the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest structure built by living organisms, and is consequently the largest world heritage area. Standing on just one of these islands doesn’t really give you any sense of scale, or indeed any sense of the skill displayed by early navigators to pass through these waters.

After the two-hour flight from Brisbane and the forty-minute bus ride to the harbour, the boat trip was a relaxing change of pace. The drone of the engines and the constant swaying of the small vessel prevented any talk amongst my fellow passengers. A nod and a smile was all that was needed.

Behind us was the last of the harbour’s channel markers, and now the skipper adjusted our direction southwards. By the time we glided up the gentle slope of the sandy beach twenty minutes later, I was so relaxed that I nearly forgot where I was. I could have been in any number of places – the Gulf of Thailand, or a tiny atoll in the South Pacific. But the sight of a small wallaby and the distant howl of dingoes on the mainland soon helped me regain my bearings.

“Welcome to Palm Bay Resort,” said the skipper - his voice jolting me out of a semi-conscious stupor... to be continued. Click here to read part 2.