Best Tropical Island Resorts in Australia

Continued from Part 1.

Leaving our luggage onboard we walked up the beach to be greeted with a glass of wine. After a second glass, and now reluctant to move out of our cane armchairs, we were shown to our bungalows.

Light and spacious, and designed with a modern south-pacific bure feel, the rooms are literally within cork-popping distance from the Coral Sea.

“All you need to do now is relax,” said Linda the friendly staff member.

“Relax?” I thought.

“Any more relaxed and I’m going to need a ventilator to breathe,” quipped my wife Lyndal, after she had already got quite a sway up in the hammock.

The twenty-one bungalows and bures that make up the award winning Peppers Palm Bay Resort are slotted in between the palms and semi-rainforests of a narrow strip of land on Long Island. No towns, no shops, no telephones in the rooms – just the island and the ocean. The low-key nature of the resort means generally you’ll only see other guests when you dine at the restaurant. Unlike the other more boisterous resorts of the Whitsundays, Palm Bay is known for its quiet and relaxed nature.

A fifty-metre walk from the pool area and you can look east towards some of the larger islands. Fifty-metres in the opposite direction and you can gaze on a setting sun over the Australian mainland. Or, if you have more energy, walking tracks meander both to the north, and south of the island.

After some time in the spa it was time to think of food. No big decisions to be made here, either dine in the La Riviera Restaurant or have it delivered to your balcony. After dinning that night on fresh local fish along with consuming perhaps just a little too much wine, we walked back to our bungalow past two small wallabies feeding on the manicured lawns. They scrambled under the bungalow and out of sight only to be replaced by several Curlews. These rare, mostly ground dwelling birds, often appear at sunset within metres of the bungalows and seem to enjoy scaring newcomers in the early hours with their distinct and mournful, ghostly cry.

If a resort could be judged by how well you sleep, then Palm Bay Resort would rate very high. But then again, that may have been the wine.

Good sleep and relaxing days in the sun means the only thing moving fast is time. Before we knew it three days had passed and I was struggling with the zip on my bag once again and looking back one last time at our bungalow.

As the boat pulled away from the beach I remembered a book I’d once read on Lieutenant Cook’s voyage and a small passage in it referring to his journal entries regarding this part of the coastline. Upon meeting local aborigines he and his crew attempted a trade. The English left blankets and other items as a gift. The next morning they returned to find them neatly piled on the beach. Cook was later to comment that these people obviously want for nothing we have, they simply want to be left alone. Perhaps that’s because this part of Australia, really has it all.?