Tropical Queensland

I just knew it was hot out there. And travelling to northern Queensland by train also prepared me for the ultra-relaxed mode that the tropics demand; by the time I got to Cairns, I was positively floppy.

I boarded the Sunlander in Brisbane lunchtime on a Thursday and spent just over 30 hours unwinding. In between eating extremely well, chatting to fellow travellers and reading my book, I was content to lounge back and watch the world slip past.

We moved through the Australian landscape. Small towns, market gardens and farms smoothed out of the bush appeared suddenly between the trees, sometimes with a classic Queenslander house at the centre of a garden slashed with bright spills of bourganvillea. Knobbly hills rose up in the distance. We slid past lives led with their backs to us, their calm disturbed just briefly by the passing silver snake.

It felt adventurous – albeit a safe and easy adventure, gentle on the nerves – but travelling by rail added another memorable dimension to the journey. 

I shared with travellers – mostly Australian – prepared to pay premium for something special. Queeslander Class provides a comfortable, private cabin and access to a lounge car and top-notch dining. Other travellers chose more basic sleepers and really hardy types spent the trip in seats. I suspect that they were less appreciative of the slower, measured mode of travel than I was. Lulled by the shifting landscape, the mesmerising jostling and sounds of the train, the complete lack of demands on me or my time or my decision-making muscles, I almost didn’t
want to arrive.

But arrive I did, into a warm and sultry Cairns. With its bright green, big-leafed foliage, its syrupy air and its heady perfume, there is no question Cairns is tropical. So, too, is Fitzroy Island, just off the coast. I arrived at the island’s Welcome Bay, stepping off a boat bound for the reef, and checked in to the Fitzroy Island Resort.

Somehow the décor of the resort described balminess – ceiling fans, cane furniture, dark wood, shaded balconies – and the views through palm fronds to a quietly lapping tide echoed the cliché without apology.

Recently reopened after a false start as a high-end, lavish affair, Fitzroy Island Resort is now an accessible treat. It’s upmarket but not outlandishly expensive; local Queenslanders bring their families for the weekend – some choose to camp, and day visitors have access to parts of the resort. Kids play in the pool, snorkel in the calm and clear-as-glass sea, hire sea kayaks and swim out to a floating trampoline. Grownups looking for some peace walk 20 minutes to beautiful little Nudie Beach where the sand is soft and white. Other beaches on the coral island are littered with bone-like chunks of stuff on their way to becoming sand. They rattle in the tide and shift underfoot.

The island is a national park with walking tracks through tropical bush, including to a lighthouse. That’s a strenuous uphill walk, best tackled before the heat of the day sets in.

Other walks involve meandering, with lazy limbs warmed by a salty breeze and a lazy mind warmed by floral perfumes and birdsong.

My almost meditative state was good preparation for the overboard overload of the next day, on Great Barrier Reef.

This involved floating on the tipsy sea looking down at a multitude of colours, textures and complex dimensions, patterns pulling and pushing through the depths – with a million fish flashing through – starring in electric blue, purple, bright yellow, fluorescent green, black, spotted, striped and abstract-patterned.

Pushing out from the pontoon into the middle of the ocean with who-knew-what below was initially nerve-wracking. Some people stayed on the Sunlover boat, missing out on one of life’s great experiences. But once the anxiety was overcome, snorkels sorted, masks cleared and the world below the surface revealed, it was dreamtime.

It was hard to accept as real. It was more like something from a fictional world – a strange and mythical world – like something out of Avatar, perhaps, that I could make believe I was flying over. 
And then I really did fly. Transferred a short distance from the diving pontoon to a floating helipad, I continued the surreal nature of the day with a chopper ride back to Cairns. Over the reef, over islands in various stages of development – from a newly born cay to fully formed and forested Fitzroy – over a peninsula tipped with white slivers of beach, in to the city. It was magical to see it from above, to look down onto the skin of the sea that I had just been under.