Sorry for the Group Email

We arrived in Airlie Beach well after the sun had gone down, and a few hours after my mouth had recovered from being numbed, extensively jabbed and sanded down, and filled. We arrived so late, in fact, that we had to rouse the manager of our camp site, who obligingly showed up, took our money and showed us to the camping grounds.

The next day revealed Airlie Beach to be a kind of backpacker paradise. The main street is a strip of pubs, clubs and surf shops, with a few cheap cafés sprinkled about. The main reason for going to Airlie Beach is to arrange a trip to the Whitsundays, a picturesque seventy four islands scattered between the Australian coast and the Great Barrier Reef. The islands are beautiful; the clear water and active coral life make them perfect for snorkelers, and the cheap booze and resorts on most of the islands make them popular with everyone else.

The trouble was, Everyone Else was already there. We were travelling in the middle of the Australian school holidays, and because New South Wales and Queensland have their holidays a week apart, there’s almost three solid weeks of family traffic around.

I didn’t exactly begrudge families their right to holiday where I was. Well, I did a bit, but it must be said that Australia is a hell of a place to have a family holiday. The weather is beautiful, as is the scenery, and I was beginning to wonder exactly what it was that made Australians so keen to travel abroad.

The problem was getting near any organised tours. We’d had problems at Fraser Island, although our solution of hiring our own car had been much better than cramming onto a tour bus with forty others.

We couldn’t exactly hire a boat, though. Well, actually we could have, theoretically: there are companies in the Whitsundays that hire out tiny outboard motorboats that don’t need a license, but I didn’t fancy my navigational or seafaring chances. It’s possible to find boats that run two day trips, sleeping on board as you go, as we had in Halung Bay in Vietnam, but for now we settled for a ticket that let us use the boat service that ran between the islands. For the money we also got use of the pools and such at each of the resorts.

And that was almost that. We took a boat to Daydream island and spent a happy few hours wandering around lush rainforests and marvelling at two-foot lizards. We ordered cocktails from the pool bar and finally understood why Australia’s plastic banknotes made such good sense. Then we took another boat to Long Island and spend a carefree few hours swinging in hammocks and reading. We stared at the vibrantly-coloured lorikeets, which stared back and dropped seeds on our heads. Then, on the way back we saw four wallabies, foraging in the undergrowth. Kangaroos might be Australia’s talismanic marsupial, but wallabies are its cutest.

We had taken our tent down that morning in anticipation of spending the night on a boat, so we arrived with sinking hearts at our campsite to find that we needed to wake up the manager again so we could book a pitch.

“That’s alright, mate. Where did you get to today, then?” he asked. Some people are surprisingly amicable.

We handed over the cash and promised we wouldn’t do it again.

The next day we were picked up by a courtesy bus and delivered to a boat for a day of island hopping, naval gazing and snorkelling. The water was calm, and I found myself re-thinking the “no boats” policy I’d implemented after our horrific experiences in Thailand and Malaysia. Even our lurching, nauseating experience on the whale watching boat in Sydney faded to a grey memory. The water was still and clear, and we arrived at our first beach with instructions to go and stare at the view for a bit. Say what you will about tours being boring, but there’s a lot to be said for being able to switch off for the day.

From there we had lunch (could it be that having made it through Asia virtually unharmed, Australia could be the most vegetarian-unfriendly country on Earth?), and went snorkelling. There was none of the sense of amazement I had on the Gillie Islands in Indonesia: there might have been more fish (indeed, you could touch them accidentally), but there were fewer varieties and less visibility. The coral, however, was something else: myriad colours. Some things looked like they should blow in the underwater current but remained steady as rocks. Others looked impenetrably solid but were easily pushed aside by the fish. Were it not for the water temperature I could have stayed there for hours.

We didn’t, of course. Freezing and soggy from the spray over the deck of the boat, we arrived at our campsite to a pre-erected tent and a car full of food. Cairns was next.

Dave read the instructions on his mouthwash bottle today. It says it may cause tartar and tooth staining. So what’s the point?