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| THE View from Hill Inlet on Whitsunday Island |
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| Looking into the Bay |
Wow - We’ve never seen anything like this before! We were picked up at 8:30am at our apartment and brought down to the harbor. We boarded the boat and took a very scenic, one hour ride to a place called Hill Inlet on Whitsunday Island. We had to tender to the island on a little dingy because of a reef there. Once on the island we took a 10 minute walk up to a spot that overlooks the Hill Inlet. And here’s where the Wow comes in. What is happening here is this – there is a lava tube just off the cost, with quartz at the bottom of this tube. And beneath the quartz lies an earthquake fault. As the fault moves – which it does imperceptibly all the time – it grinds the quartz into silica. The ebb and flow of the tide then sucks the silica out of the tube and into the currents, where it swirls all around the very shallow bay before being deposited on the beach. Just a beautiful scene. Pictures here are worth way more than a thousand words.
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| Whitehaven Beach |
Our next stop was on one of those beaches – the famous Whitehaven Beach. The sand (or silica) is so white and so fine – it really is amazing. (Check out the video below of Joanie and I walking, and pay attention to the sound our feet make as they rub along the sand.) We spent about two hours on that beach, walking, swimming, relaxing and having a pretty good “Barbie” on the beach, provided by our crew.
After this very nice stop, we hopped back on the boat for about an hour’s ride to a place called Luncheon Bay where we snorkeled. It was a beautiful bay and I’m sure the snorkeling can be awesome there, but the clouds started to move in (blocking the sunlight) and the water itself wasn’t all that clear today. But we did get to pet some pretty large bat fish – that was fun. And Joanie found a $5 bill (Australian) floating in the water!
We then boarded the ship one last time for our one hour ride home. All in all it was a fantastic, very memorable day.
Couple of side notes here: We met a couple on the boat (fellow tourists) who were from the Canary Islands, and they didn’t speak English well at all – but Joanie had a great time talking it up with them in Spanish. They were a very nice couple, and I got to interact with them as well through my personal translator.
Also, we wanted to put something in the blog about all the Australian phrases we’ve been hearing. “How you going?“ Pokies – Sunnies – Servo – Brekky - Long Blacks – and so many more. It’s really been funny to see a white, “English speaking” (or more correctly, they speak “’Stry-lian”) culture that has so many similarities with Americans, yet they do all lot of things their own way.
