Australia Part Two: Hamilton Island in the Whitsundays

We left Melbourne, with koalas and beautiful scenery in our minds, headed to the Great Barrier Reef to do some snorkeling.  We had about a week left after we left Melbourne, and we knew that we had to fit in a trip to the Whitsundays...I mean, if we were this far away from home, we had to get there!

So we started to formulate what the week would look like and looked into flying out of Sydney, which we did.  Ok. Our trip was starting to take shape-the next big decision was should we go to Hamilton Island for 4 days or should we give Sydney that extra day.  In the end, we decided that we would give the relaxing, dreamy island the extra day, and although I loved Sydney, I am glad that we did.

The Hub had just been through a tiring week of presenting and motivating in his training sessions.  He had a pretty big meeting that he would have to be at the day following our return to Munich.  So, the Islands won out.  We made the decision to stay on Hamilton Island, which is the island with the airport.  When we flew in, I didn't want us to have to spend the first day (or our last day) getting from one island to the other.  Staying on Hamilton Island allowed us a very smooth transition from plane to waiting transportation right to the hotel.

And, when we opened up our room and looked out of the glass doors onto the balcony, this is what we saw:

Seriously....paradise. There are hundreds of cockatoos that live on the island.  Most of them hoping for a treat from a tourist.  There are signs everywhere cautioning you not to feed them, though...gives them indigestion, and plays with the natural balance of man and bird.

 The Hub was so excited about seeing some reef and Clownfish, that he went right in just across from our hotel, the reef in the view from the window.  He was sad, though, because it was overrun with seaweed, and not much in the way of colorful coral.

 We took a snorkel trip on our first full day on the island-a half day trip.  We snorkeled right off of this beach: Chalkies Beach.  The reef was so close that we just walked in from the sand and put on our flippers.  It was very shallow and on this stop we didn't see any Clownfish, but we did see a lot of beautiful corals in pink hues.

After our snorkel time, it was on the boat on off to this gorgeous white sand beach that reminded me a whole lot of Destin-Whitehaven Beach. You can see our boat behind me here:

 The next day we took another half day snorkeling trip and this time I got a few pics of us in our really sexy stinger suits.  We were in Australia at the tail end of jellyfish season, and everyone on every dive trip we took wore the suits...on this trip, we found a bunch of Nemos!

 The last day we took a full-day trip on a boat with some SCUBA divers...it took us 2 hours to get to the edge of the Reef and the snorkeling was amazing!  Again, we found some clownfish, and again we saw amazing coral-this time, the coral was on plateaus and also had some terrific cliffs and drops for us to explore under the water.

I took this from the dive boat: I didn't know that there could be so many shades of blue and white...

 So as we enjoyed our last sunset on Hamilton Island...

 And the last Hobie Cats were rented for the day....

 Something you should know is:

Sometimes snorkeling isn't so pretty!  We are on to our last stop of our Australia trip next: Sydney.