Corroboree!
As host city, Adelaide gets the opportunity not only to showcase her conference facilities, but also to show off and entertain us after official working hours. The first evening we were given a traditional Aborigine welcome at the National Wine Centre and afterwards several of the local wineries were offering wine tasting to complement the food at the stands. The second evening we visited the Adelaide Oval. I’m not a cricket fan myself but many of the men among us were in awe at seeing the memorabilia displays and the floodlit pitch after its multimillion dollar stadium facelift. For the third evening we were told not to wear white footwear and to take a jacket as we’d be going directly from the conference centre to the evening venue. Needless to say there was an air of anticipation building during the day as we tried to work out what we might be doing! The fleet of coaches arrived promptly and whisked us off to the Adelaide Parklands Terminal and all was revealed – the Ghan in all her glory! The Ghan is regarded as one of the world’s greatest rail journeys - her symbol is a camel and its handler in recognition of the pioneering Afghan cameleers who forged the original trail through Australia’s red centre. We were able to walk through the whole train and see the restaurants and the red, gold and platinum seating made up for day and night use. We then found ourselves back out on the platform which had been adorned with fairly lights, tables set for dinner and the distinctive red earth underfoot – a wonderful experience! After sampling so much local wine we couldn’t possibly leave South Australia without visiting a winery or two. South Australia has 18 wine regions but the Barossa Valley has more than 80 cellar doors and 150 wineries alone, so we didn’t need to go far. They even let us loose in the lab at Penfolds to blend our own which was great fun! Did you know the South Australian wine industry is responsible for more than half the production of all Australian wine?
After our busy week in Adelaide we went our separate ways and split into 27 groups to explore further. I had chosen the Whitsundays and our flight was at 0600 via Sydney into Hamilton Island. This is a stunning airport to fly into and marked the beginning of our whistle stop tour. We boarded the Cruise Whitsundays ferry seamlessly to take us and our luggage to Airlie Beach for afternoon tea & a site inspection at Peppers and then transferred to the Abell Point Marina to meet the Solway Lass. She is a historic two-masted schooner and usually operates three and six night live-aboard cruises but she was only our home for the one night. We enjoyed a lovely steak dinner on the deck under the stars and retired fairly early. The next morning the water was like a millpond and we could see fish the size of dinner plates just swimming by. After breakfast we set off in the zodiac boat to the reef for a morning of diving and snorkelling. As it’s still considered to be stinger season we were required to wear stinger suits so we didn’t exactly look very glamorous! After a wonderful morning on the reef and lunch on board we headed back to the marina for our next stop – the Waters Edge apartments back at Airlie beach. The apartments were huge with lovely views over the bay – all be it from the back of the resort! However, it was only a five minute stroll downhill into the town which has a holiday feel to it and we had dinner at Capers on the Esplanade.
Another early start as we were checked out by 06.45 to transfer back to the marina for our next nautical adventure – a day on the Camira catamaran. Camira is one of the world's fastest commercial sailing catamarans and can take around 100 people but she usually sails with a maximum of 80 in high season. I think we had around 60 people sitting in the ‘departure lounge’ at the marina but it didn’t feel crowded once we were all on board. We donned the compulsory stinger suits for snorkelling after lunch and then headed for the ultimate beach – Whitehaven. The pristine silica sand of Whitehaven stretches over seven kilometres and is regularly voted as one of the best beaches in the world and it certainly didn’t disappoint! Once we were back on board we had a relaxing sail to Daydream Island Resort & Spa where we were relieved to be reunited with our luggage.
We discovered that Daydream Island & Spa has an interesting history on our site inspection. The mermaid statues are named Serenity, Aphrodesia and Infinity, representing respectively mind, body and spirit. The spa was built by Vaughan Bullivant, an Australian health mogul, when he owned the island and it has no less than 16 individual treatment rooms with Vichy showers, thermal tables, hydrotherapy tubs, steam effusion showers, dual treatment rooms & dual spa baths. I’ve seen some spas in my time but this was way above what I expected on this family style island that has its own Australia themed 18 hole mini gold and 44ft outdoor movie screen! We also had the opportunity to visit their living reef and hand feed the stingrays, lemon sharks and barramundi. They have resident marine biologists running the sessions and as it’s unlikely you’ll find Nemo or Dorey when you’re snorkelling, they’ve even made a ‘Nemoville’ habitat on their reef so the kids go home happy. We snorkelled off the smallest beach here and took some fishfood out with us. As soon as it was released into the water we were surrounded by fish including some parrot fish almost a foot long!
After a relaxed picnic lunch on our beach, Cruise Whitsundays picked us up again and took us on to Hamilton Island. As you can imagine, an island that’s big enough for an airport has a larger range of accommodation, so as soon as we arrived we were allocated our own fleet of golf buggies to do the site inspection! Hamilton is a beautiful Island with the Marina Village and Catseye beach at its heart, but our aim was to be at One Tree Hill lookout for the ultimate sundowner which was everything it promised to be. We had ‘breakfast with the koalas’ before our afternoon pick up, overnight back at Airlie and our early morning flight from Proserpine to begin our journey home from another wonderful trip!