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Published: March 11th 2014
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6
th March Airlie Beach, Whitsundays
We have been to the Whitsundays before staying at Port Douglas and Hamilton Island so the visit here was just a one day stop for those people wanting to get to the Great Barrier Reef and also to get ashore to stretch those legs. We have great memories of our time here.
Airlie Beach is a town in the Whitsundays and is one of many departure points for the Great Barrier Reef and what you see is what you get.
The Whitsunday Islands (there are 74); named by James Cook in 1770 are a sailors' paradise. Cook named the islands as he believed he passed through the area on the Christian festival day of Whit Sunday.
Airlie Beach is a tourist destination, extremely popular with backpackers. Its beach is small and the sea is inhabited by marine stingers, the box jellyfish from November to May. In order to provide somewhere for the visitors to swim, the local council, has built a small – medium sized swimming lagoon on the foreshore, similar to a lagoon found in Cairns.
The Great
Barrier Reef is easily accessible from Airlie Beach, with an array of different types of tours available. This is a tender port; the people going out to the reef were transported directly onto the craft (catamarans) to take them on their tour.
We had opted for a tour to see the historical side of the area. This proved to be not what we had planned. Few buildings in Airlie Beach are older than 35 years so not much history, after leaving Airlie Beach we went to Proserpine to a museum run by volunteers. The whole area is dependent on agriculture so on the way we were shown sugar cane fields and sugar cane fields and you guessed it sugar cane fields. The museum was just a collection of ‘tat’ from the bygone eras of farming, old rusting machinery, some mannequins dressed as farm workers in agricultural scenes etc.
Back towards Airlie Beach via a highpoint (photo opportunity) and then back into town to be dropped off at the yacht club. Those wishing to go back to the ship could do, most did!!
So that was it, no mention of the indigenous
Ngaro & Gia people who originally inhabited the area (which is history), settlers only arrived here in the 1930’s and fewer than a 100 people lived here in the 1950’s.
We walked via the town past the lagoon along a boardwalk back to the pier quite disappointed. It would have been just as easy to walk round the town take in the McDonalds etc and come back to the ship not having forked out for the tour.
We weren’t the only ones disappointed; the catamaran that took over 400 to the Great Barrier Reef came back late afternoon with the majority having been seasick. The seas out to the reef and at the reef were not the ‘idyll’ everyone was expecting.
As Lin said at dinner that evening (the restaurant had a lot of empty tables), Thank goodness we have our memories of the Whitsundays from our previous visit.
Next stop Rabaul Papua New Guinea
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