Budget travellers are lured to the Whitsundays by the good-value overnight yacht trips around the islands, similar dive-boat excursions plus an abundance of backpacker accommodation and night-life at Airlie.
However if they want to actually stay on one of the islands, the choices are much more limited.
Want to spend some time at a midrange resort with its extensive landscaping, nice beach, twin pools, free spa, suana, kayaks, a good range of organized activities and access to some of the nicer trekking trails in the WhitSundays for $uad37 a night in a budget room? Well LONG ISLAND RESORT is the place.
Actually the deal can be sweeter - Airlie Beach trip-agents and hostels were offering last week 2 nights for $aud99 including transfers. Now the latter are $64 return, so in effect your bed is costing you $17.50 a night . Or if you factor in $37x2 for the bed, the return transfer is costing you $25, not the $64 daytrippers pay.
Long Island is a long (duh!) narrow island not far out of Shute Harbour which is one of the two departure points for Island transfers.
The position at Happy Bay is pretty good on the best beach of the island, facing north which provides shelter from the SE trade winds which are the prevailing breezes in the holiday season and do get blustery at times.
The beach is pretty nice, at least away from the few hours around low tide where it can look fairly ordinary with a lot of exposed sandy/mud and rock. However most WhitSunday resort beaches are similar.
The resort had a mob of semi-tame wallabies, often seen on the beach, which provided good value, particularly to overseas guests.
There are 2 pools - a beachside one with swim up bar and a nearby 25m lap-swimmers pool. These were never crowded - I estimated the resort was last week running at maybe 20% capacity, mainly honeymooners and families. There seemed to be a max of about 8 people in the backpackers’ area. I have to say that at these non-peak times the staff/guest ratio seemed abt 1:1 - there was a huge component of ground and cleaning staff particularly.
Approaching sunset saw a few happy hour drinkers at the poolside bars, for beers at a reasonable (for resorts) $4 a full-strength can ($6 other times). Cheapskate tezza had the usual 2 litre box of cheap Oz red for sunset on the lie-lows under a palm tree at the end of the beach.
Budget travellers stay in the Barefoot Lodge - the budget travellers’ accommodation. There were around 16 rooms here (and a similar adjacent lodge which seemed to be out of use) each with two double bunks, a fan, big mirror, small vanity, just enough room for 4 people and their gear but clothes storage (including hanging space) for only 2 people’s stuff. The place was spotless, in good repair, had nice polished floors and unusually for backpacker-level accommodation had soap, shampoo and towels supplied.
The fine print suggested single bookings were less desirable than couples and groups, but my agent had no problems booking me single and I was the only dude in my room both nights. Okay, once look at tezza’s rather scary head is enough to dissuade any responsible receptionist from putting me in with Miss Sweden. Darn! Actually I noticed one other single guy with his own room so maybe the general policy is to accept single bookings and not have them share if possible.
The Barefoot Lodge had a big common room with some comfy chairs, a TV set, a jug, a free supply of coffee, tea and sugar sachets, a very small bar-type fridge - but no cooking facilities or food storage areas.
The idea seems to be for budget guests to use the resort’s dining room and café. The former’s buffet dinners for $25 and breakfasts at $18 seemed to be the best deal there (hell, pig out on a buffet breakfast and forget about anything until late evening) but I found the café’s $6.50 toasted chicken and cheese sanga mit chips did the job real well - tastier and more filling than anything around the same money from any mainland Macca’s+ or +Tuck-Chooky. Needless to say, cheapskate me also bought a good supply of canned fish, beans, bread, honey, fruit and snacks for other times.
The resort employs a couple of keen activities people to offer guests some structured stuff if they tire from lazing on the beach. Directed group activities aint my scene and I thought a lot of the stuff pretty cheesy until I saw the winning beach volleyball team scoffing their prize - a rather large bottle of Oz champers.
You can do a lot of this stuff under your own steam. The gym, kayaks, spa, sauna, ping pong, tennis and basketball are free and other watersports and the minigolf had a charge. And of course you don’t need anyone to hold your hand on the bush-walks - there is a pretty good map showing the various tracks available at reception.
BUSH WALKS - TREKKING
There’s something like 20km of walking tracks on the island, mostly thru pretty nice secondary rainforest, all part of the Molle Islands National Park. The island is hilly so you get a good workout, but I wouldn’t class any slopes in the KILLER or even STEEP-STEEP category.
Rainforest animal life is more nocturnal - I saw quite a few birds and heard lots more, disturbed a colony of bats when I short-cutted thru a closed-off track, a nice goanna which is Australia’s main version of big monitor lizard and a small black tipped reef shark fossiking close to shore in one of the small bays.
The most dangerous animals I encountered were 2 National Park rangers, each guy coincidently about 2m tall, with huge old-style 303-type rifles. They told me they were after a wild pig which had swum over from the mainland. Porky must have been the loser in some territorial dispute over there to take on the swim. The crocs were a bit slow that day, because he made it. Wild pigs can get huge, the size of small cattle and cause a hell of a lot of damage to natural fauna and flora. And if a girlfriend happens to do a similar swim, they are awesome breeders. Feral pigs can be quite dangerous to humans particularly if they are nursing their young.
A feature of most National Park walking tracks is that the authorities make no effort to enhance views, so that a lot of the outlooks are tree interrupted but the 3.5km WhitSunday Circuit around the north end of the island did have one nice natural clearing with good views across to neighbouring islands and the north coast.
The 6 km southwards walk down to Sandy Bay takes quite a while because there are some good side tracks and side loops. Sandy Bay is very ordinary and looked real croc territory to me, but I did notice some National Park camping spots cut into the adjacent rainforest here, so it must be okay. Queensland National Park camping sites are a real bargain, $3 a night last time I did it 2 years ago, but getting out to the island sites (there are half a dozen spots on the various WhitSundays including one on the south-end of fabulous Whitehaven Beach) aint cheap - there is an island camping transfer boat which will take you for $30 each way.
About 2km into the track is a much nicer beach at Palm Bay. This is the location of the rather exxy Pepper’s Long Island boutique style resort
Accommodation here is chalets and bures, although they were building some two-bedroom bungalows on the overlooking hill with pretty nice views.
A sign asks non guests not to move towards the beach area, but there is no such thing as a private beach in Australia. Sure landowners can stop you accessing the beach thru their property, but what are they gunna do - shoot you? Nobody shot me.
GETTING THERE ...I have a fair bit more info including GETTING TO LONG ISLAND, OTHER ISLAND DEALS, A SIMILAR COVER OF THE OTHER BUDGET ISLAND DESTINATION - HOOK ISLAND WILDERNESS RESORT plus a host of purty photos showing much of the above at this site.
Edited by: tezza
