Sleep on a bed of coral

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This was published 12 years ago

Sleep on a bed of coral

Float your boat ... a glass-bottom semi-submersible (foreground) and the Fantasea Reefworld pontoon.

Float your boat ... a glass-bottom semi-submersible (foreground) and the Fantasea Reefworld pontoon.

Erik Jensen experiences the Great Barrier Reef by day and night aboard a fully-provisioned pontoon.

There is a turtle at the door when I wake. This does not ordinarily happen. I'm sleeping on a floating platform moored off the side of the Great Barrier Reef, 40 nautical miles from shore.

The pontoon, about half the size of a tennis court, is a little like the post-apocalyptic city Kevin Costner occupied in Waterworld. It is an astounding place in which to wake but pointedly utilitarian. If you spent too long here, you might lose faith in the existence of dry land. "I've sailed further than most have dreamed," Costner says in the trailer for the 1995 flop, "and I haven't seen it."

The turtle is just breaking the surface as it pulls at the sea growth on the underside of the platform. Its eyes roll back with each mouthful as though, just after dawn, it is already exhausted.

No one else seems to be awake yet. The wind is up. I climb on the roof of the pontoon, to a row of empty banana lounges and lashing sails, and look at the great wet emptiness that stretches to the horizon on each side. Yesterday seems like a long time ago. Within an hour of leaving Hamilton Island, we were clear of the Whitsundays - the 74 islands of hoop pine and igneous rock, named after a Christian holiday and famed for sea coloured by pale, suspended sediment. Another hour and we are at this reef platform.

Before lunch, I'm already scuba diving on Hardy Reef. After a brief explanation and a true-or-false exam, I am on the edge of the reef wall, 10 metres below the surface.

Mackerel cut flaring strips out of the schools of bait fish. A clown fish hides in the arms of an anemone. The reef is wildly alive. The expression "teeming with life" is horribly overused but inescapable. Things are living on every inch of this formation. Beyond it, there are fish as far as the water will let you see.

After an hour under water - feeling for the first time the strange slowing of movement under the weight of water and scuba gear - it seems alien just returning to the surface. By mid-afternoon, the day-trippers who use the platform for snorkelling have left. That is how most people see the reef: in a four-hour window, wearing borrowed stinger suits, with a buffet at lunchtime.

This has been the routine since the 1940s, when tourists started visiting Hardy Reef once a week on a round trip that took three days from Mackay. This platform has been used to sleep guests for 15 years. When the day-trippers leave on the largish catamaran that brought us here, there is an acute sense of aloneness. The helicopter that was running joy flights over nearby Heart Reef - which is much smaller than I expected; more a Mouse Heart Reef - leaves about the same time.

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And then, for about 20 hours, there are just six Reefsleep guests and the small crew of reef-rats that staff the platform. We drink champagne in a glass-bottom semi-submersible as it floats over the reef at high tide. Jacqui, a marine biologist and crew member, points out fish and giant clams. The next morning, she will take us by boat into the centre of the reef lagoon, where we will snorkel for an hour over delicate sheltered corals.

We have dinner under water, in a glass room beneath the platform. The light from the windows brings hundreds of trevally out of the darkness. A Queensland grouper the size of a hatchback drives past. The staff have called it George. Sea creatures, it seems, have the most ordinary of names.

The platform has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, the glass underwater dining room and an open-air viewing platform.

This is not luxury. The closest analogy I can think of is a floating caravan. It is melamine-chic. The food is lovingly average. The sheets are not particularly thick. There are acrylic angelfish in a triptych above my bed. There is one double room, which costs $1300 a night for a couple. The other bedroom, with single bunks, sleeps four and costs $480 a person. But the guest book is filled with messages from happy couples, many on their honeymoons, and guests effusively praising the staff and experience. Both are indeed very good.

On either side of the Reefsleep, I stay on Hamilton Island. You could travel to Reefworld direct from the Whitsundays' mainland centre of Shute Harbour (the shuttle to the pontoon takes two hours) but using Hamilton Island as the launch pad (90 minutes to the platform) is probably a better option.

Heaven in 1983, I suspect, was a place where indoor waterfalls could be made from concrete, and golf buggies replaced cars; where the country's tallest cyclone-resistant glass lift would reach 19 storeys, had it been completed. Hamilton Island is still that place.

There is on Hamilton Island a perpetual sense that Australia has just won the America's Cup and the dollar is about to be floated. People are happy. Life is good. A few things have changed, of course: Jamie Durie is no longer an exotic dancer and is now the gardener, a new yacht club has been built, the resort rooms have been revamped and a string of luxury cabins has been built.

I wake my first morning on the eighth floor of the island's Reef View Hotel, in the first scenes of a Duran Duran-style video. Over the end of my sheets - thicker than those on the reef pontoon, if you were wondering - I can see all of Catseye Bay. Sun cuts a catamaran into silhouette. I imagine it to be piloted by Simon Le Bon.

Like the reef, this is a beautiful place. The staff all have the same hair colour, although I doubt they are related. I think of the Whitsundays as a place of luxurious nostalgia.

Erik Jensen travelled courtesy of Hamilton Island and Fantasea Adventure Cruising.

FAST FACTS

Getting there

Virgin Australia has a fare to Hamilton Island from Sydney for $175; Jetstar has a $149 fare; both take 2hr 25min non-stop. Jetstar has a fare from Melbourne for $159 (2hr 55min non-stop); Virgin Australia has a fare from Melbourne via Sydney (about 4hr) for $239. Fares are one way, including tax.

Fantasea operates charters and regular ferries connecting Shute Harbour, Hamilton Island and the Whitsunday Islands; see fantasea.com.au.

Staying there

Reefsleep on Reefworld, operated by Fantasea Adventure Cruising, costs $480 a person in the bunk room sleeping four people and $650 a person in a double king room. The cost includes overnight accommodation, transfer from Hamilton Island to the pontoon, breakfast, two lunches and a dinner with wine, sunset drinks, one scuba dive or guided snorkelling safari and use of the underwater viewing chamber, semi-submersible and a waterslide. Extras include helicopter rides and massages. Reefsleep operates year-round (weather permitting) but is closed on Tuesdays. Hamilton Island has a range of accommodation, including the Qualia retreat, boutique Beach Club Resort, self-contained holiday homes and Yacht Club villas. The author stayed in the Reef View Hotel, which has sea views from most rooms. A Coral Sea View room costs from $436; see hamiltonisland.com.au.

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