Julie and Harold Head to Australia and New Zealand, 2019 AND Deborah and Gil travel along: Hamilton Island (Great Barrier Reef) -- a rest vacay in the middle of our vacay

We arrived at Hamilton Island around 11:00 am on Thursday, Feb 14, and since this island is a tourist destination, everything went smoothly. A bus from the Reef Hotel was there to pick us up, and soon we were at the huge Reef View Hotel where we spent our first night after exploring the island a bit. The Island doesn’t have many vehicles so the main mode of transportation is either golf cart or bus.

The island has two major bus lines: the green bus and the blue bus. The green bus stops multiple locations about every 10 or 15 minutes and takes people from the hotel locations to the marina area, circling around all day long. The blue bus comes about every 25 minutes and goes around the entire island.

We jumped on the blue bus to explore a bit and found that this bus was used by workers, school kids going to and from school, and tourists like us (fewer of the latter, however; mostly, the blue line seems to be for locals). We saw beautiful houses and a ton of beautiful condo buildings, along with some beautiful scenery and a bar at the top of one of the hills. Yes!

Yep, we could live here!

Hamilton Island has a population of about 1200 people, and in 2015, it was named by Australian Traveller as the “Most Desirable Island Escape.” We are happy to escape here. It is a part of the Whitsunday Islands, named after a post-Easter Christian holiday, and is the only island in the Great Barrier Reef that has its own commercial airport; we flew into that convenient airport.

It was Valentine’s Day, so we went to the Mariner’s Restaurant for a nice meal after the hotel concierge worked with the restaurant to get us a table at the already fully booked fine dining restaurant. We had a very nice meal and enjoyed the international servers, as well as the meal itself.

Soft shell crab -- as good as it looks

Valentines -- Deborah and Gil

Then back to the hotel for a good night’s sleep before our “Reef Sleep” adventure (see special posting).

After the “Reef Sleep,” we were happy to see a representative from Holiday Homes at the wharf when we got off the boat, holding up a sign that said “Julie Rodakowski.” Yay – that’s us!

He took us to our BEAUTIFUL condo home for the next three days overlooking the cove with a wonderful beach, complete with our own jazzy red electric golf cart, and access to free boards, kayaks, scuba snorkel equipment, jelly fish stinger suits, wet suits . . . You name it, we have access to it! And to our absolute delight, there was an “Agile Wallaby" on the grounds right in front of the condo building, along with a ton of birds -- lots of cockatoos and tons of large flying fruit bats (sometimes called flying foxes).

This "agile wallaby" was on the grass right in front of our patio balcony when we arrived

This cockatoo also greeted us. Note the door/window sign requesting that people keep their doors closed so that the cockatoos don't fly into the apartment which they are prone to do apparently.

The view from our condo and our patio

We were exhausted, but we took our golf cart to the Reef Hotel for a drink and dinner. As we were pulling out of our parking space, some other tourists in cart behind us were laughing at us pulling out of our space: start, drive a foot, stop, jerk, start, go another foot, jerk, stop. It was funny, but in Harold’s defense, since the motor is electric, you can’t tell if it’s running or not, and the “gas” pedal wasn’t as smooth as it might have been. Anyway, after a lot of laughing by both us and the group behind us, we did get home, and Harold was even able to park the golf cart in a parallel parking spot. We dutifully plugged in our vehicle, went inside and WENT TO SLEEP!

Oh, so fun. You probably can't see it, but the cart had the name of our condo development and the number of our unit on it, so we had no trouble finding it in a long row of parked golf carts.

It was wise to place this “vacation” in the middle of our vacation. We had three days to savor restfulness in a stunning location. For the first day, we did the necessities like washing clothes, going to the grocery story, getting reservations for dinner for two evenings (not an easy task), learning to drive the golf cart a bit more proficiently, buying some alcohol, getting caught up on the blog, and just hanging out in our condo apartment and on our patio.

Harold, sitting on our patio enjoying life a fraction of a second AFTER a beautiful cockatoo flew away. He had previously been sitting on the white railing looking right at him. Sigh.

We went to Romano’s, the nicer Italian place in town. It was good, nothing to write home about though (or to write about in this blog).

Then we had a day of total relaxation. Did nothing! Well, not totally true. We went to the condo pool in the morning – very nice especially since it had a kite-like covering on it, so we were in the shade. We watched people on the beach. We went to the City Center to pick up some sandwiches for take out for lunch. We read. We had a martini (etc.) on the patio. Then we got cleaned up after such a hard-working day, so we could go out for dinner. C’est tout.

Our final event at Hamilton Island was to cuddle a koala at the Wildlife Center: soft and fuzzy, she was. They never have to groom koalas because koalas use two conjoined claws on their hind paws for nothing but grooming. On their hind paws, they also have a thick “thumb” and two other claws to help them grab onto the trees. On their front paws, they have three fingers and two thumbs, again used to grab the tree trunks easily. It also helps them move quickly. Other koala facts: they sleep 20 hours a day, the other four hours they eat, but only in brief spurts. Their brains are very small (10 grams) and they are not smart. They don’t even recognize food unless it is on a branch. As our guide said, they basically spend their lives sleeping, eating, and pooping. When they are small, the baby koalas eat the mother’s poop which is round, small, hard, and filled with eucalyptus leaves as well as a substance necessary for their digestive systems to be able to digest the leaves. If joeys don’t get this substance, they would die. Koalas are also killed by cars because once the leaves are gone from one tree, they head to another, and if a road is in the way, they don’t know the difference. An informative morning, and both Julie and Deborah got to hold and cuddle a koala. We also went on a little tour of the Wildlife Refuge on the island. It was fine.