Here's a view from our hotel balcony during daylight. We were just opposite the Saturday morning markets set up along the beach.
I walked through the markets to find breakfast - bacon & egg rolls and fresh fruit bowls. I saw lots of purses and other paraphernalia from Thailand marked up about 400%. Good thing we made our purchases at the source.
Here's Katie hanging out on the pier as we waited to board the ocean rafting tour from the Coral Sea Hotel departure point.
Here's a look at the boat on which we ripped through the Whitsundays.
Katie and I headed straight for the rear of the boat, being all too familiar with the wild ride to be had near the front.
People bounced up and down along the sides of the raft as we crashed against waves. I must say this ride was much tamer than the one at Phi Phi Island.
We had beautiful water, islands, and mountains all around us.
The color of the water varied greatly as we travelled.
Our tour day happened to coincide with the annual coconut collection competition. Having spotted and collected 9 coconuts, we outdid the previous year's record of 8 but didn't even come close to the winning team with 16.
I've got some real synchronized swimming moves!
And so does Katie.
We did about as much posing for the camera as we did snorkeling. We made two snorkeling stops, and I was the first over the edge into the freezing water. The first stop was rather cloudy and not anything too special, but the second stop at the Key Hole had the most colorful coral we've ever seen.
Look at that color gradient across the water!
We spun around Whitehaven Beach to take in its spectacular beauty.
Our approach to the most beautiful beach ever seen or imagined at Hill Inlet and Lookout on Whitehaven Beach. This beach is only accessible by small eco-friendly boats and does not allow overnight guests, so it is remote and pristine (immaculate).
The water was perfectly clear along the shore and extended out into ribbons of aqua, blue, and emerald with a mountainous backdrop. The 98% silica sand was white, clean, soft, and cool underfoot (never gets hot).
Katie and I at Hill Inlet.
We enjoyed a picnic lunch on the beach followed by a snooze in the sand and just took in the surreal, never-before-seen beauty on this perfectly warm, sunny day.
The entire tour group did a bushwalk up to a lookout point to find this spectacular view. It was about a kilometer each way and is apparently the only bushwalk on Whitehaven Island.
Another view from the lookout.
Could you ever tire of looking at this?
An island off the coast of Hill Inlet.
On our way back to the marina, we swerved over the wake of another raft and they did likewise. The boats tipped nearly sideways as they quickly switched directions giving us quite an exciting ride. We walked back to the hotel along a man-made lagoon encircled with sand (what a great land development idea!).
After a shower and a movie, we headed down to KC's Irish Pub for dinner, where we ran into an Irish couple from the ocean rafting tour, who we'd also seen at Capers the previous night. We talked for a while and sent drinks over to their table in honor of their honeymoon. In the meantime, we'd been seated at a table for eight, so when a group of five was being seated at a small table for four, we offered to switch tables to give them more space. They said we should join them, so we ended up having dinner for seven (that's our table in the photo with the guy singing just behind us). They were from all over Australia but were now all working locally. I also made friends with a girl in the lou who'd been to Austin. What a small, friendly world. Not always though...later that night, we witnessed a bar brawl where a guy who got his head bashed against the wall by security had the nerve to come back, which ended in a sidewalk fight just outside the bar.
