Daydream is in the Whitsunday group and seems to be nothing more than a small island containing a hotel and sports facilities. Coming out on the ferry yesterday morning, it was a bit like arriving on Fantasy Island and I half expected Tattoo to be waiting for us on the jetty. After the challenges of Fraser Island, our two days on Daydream have been all about relaxing - in fact, it's felt something like a good old fashioned Butlins family holiday complete with cabaret. The hotel has a private beach called Sunlovers, but our coach captain admits that it isn't exactly easy to locate and that he had been coming here for quite a while before somebody showed him how to get to it. It doesn't help that neither of the two lifts (elevators, if you're American) seem to be able to agree on what the floors are called - asking Lift 1 to take you to the second floor results in you coming out into the same place that Lift 2 takes you to if you ask it for the third floor. Given that the hotel brochure says the entrance to the private beach is on the third floor, this causes some confusion to start with. In the end, after asking several people who weren't even aware that there was a private beach, it turned out that the entrance was on the fourth floor - somewhere that it seemed almost impossible to get the lift to go to at all. The walk to the beach involved a stroll along a boardwalk through a wooded area which emerged onto scorching sand on the hottest side of the island. The confusion concerning the beach seems to be something of a blessing in disguise as it eventually meant that I was able to enjoy the afternoon laying on the white sand turning a nice shade of brown without having sand kicked in my face by the profusion of young children that seem to be staying here at the moment. The hotel had provided snorkelling equipment which also meant that I was able to lay face down in the shallows for a while looking at the multicoloured fish, which would've been slightly more pleasant had it not been for the fact that I became far too fascinated by the way the little yellow ones crowded around my fingers that I forgot where I was and managed to cook my back quite nicely. Yesterday evening, there was an expensive looking cabaret show in the bar involving fire breathing and more Polynesian dancing girls - they seem to be particularly hung up on pretending we're not in Australia over here. In fact, at dinner we had all been adorned with Lei (Hawaiian style flower rings which they hang around your neck) and filled with wine so that we were all well into the spirit of things by the time the entertainers started inviting members of the audience to jump through rings of fire or get hypnotised into squawking like chickens. There were some red faces, not to mention noses in the morning, that's for sure. Afterwards, several of us weaved our way to the southern end of the island where a live band was playing in the hotel's nightclub. This morning, we all met down on the Jetty and boarded a boat which sped us out to Whitehaven Beach. Locals will tell you that Whitehaven is the most perfect beach in the world - which of course is what you hear from locals the world over about their favourite beach - but although I probably wouldn't go quite that far myself, at least it does have the distinction of being the only beach on Whitsunday Island which the public is allowed to visit. The rest of the island is a National Park and they are very careful about who they let tramp around over there. Sound familiar? I can almost hear Leonardo De Caprio heading this way. Our boat wasn't allowed to land, so we were shuttled onto the beach a few at a time on a raft. The sand was, indeed, so soft that it almost ran through my fingers before I'd picked it up - but there wasn't time to play with sand because we were followed from the boat by a fully stocked minibar and sporting equipment and before I knew it we were all very drunk and splashing about in the ocean trying to play some form of bizarre water cricket. I thought about putting on my best James Bond voice and chatting up two gorgeous Scandinavian girls who had joined us on the trip, but getting out of the water I discovered to my dismay that I had been attacked by sand flies. Now, this is unusual for me - as a general rule, I'm one of those people who can be locked for days in a room full of mosquitoes and come out without even a single bite. But apparently, whatever it is that mosquitoes hate about me is incredibly exciting to a sand fly because I was suddenly covered from head to foot in little red marks which were very itchy and made me look like an extra from some horrible medical disaster movie. Not feeling particularly suave any more, I decided instead to top up my tan but by the time I got around to laying out my towel, slapping myself with sunscreen (or should that be slopping?) and settling back to bake, we were being called back onto the boat. It seems that any one tour party can only occupy this particular three mile stretch of beach for an hour, and I could already see the next boat arriving. Spoilsports. The entertainment this evening was slightly more on the surreal side than last night. We had been promised Toad Racing, which as you can imagine had been intriguing us all day. In the event, however, it appears that either nobody had been able to find any real toads or that everybody was just feeling particularly lazy today, because what we found when we got downstairs was a large table on which sat six stuffed frogs. We then sat around for the evening betting on these creatures and feeling ever so slightly stupid while somebody shook a dice and physically moved them across the table towards the finishing line. If it weren't for the fact that this is clearly a very important local tradition and people were eagerly waving fifty dollar bills in the air and screaming "Come on, Croaky" at the stuffed frogs, I would've gone to bed a lot earlier... but I can honestly say that there was something totally mesmerising about watching grown men betting on stuffed animals. There really can't be much to do at night in the Whitsundays when the band has gone home!
My complete travel journals are at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2
