Finally back on the blog after a busy couple of months organising our wedding, which took place on 8 May, a very sunny and beautiful day. It was a great afternoon and evening full of celebration, tears, laughter and lots of dancing from young and old alike.
Two days later we headed north to Queensland's Hamilton Island for our honeymoon. Back in June 1770, Captain James Cook sailed through the Whitsunday Passage, passing by Hamilton Island.
Covering an area of 750 hectares, Hamilton Island has spectacular sunsets, beautiful butterflies, cute marine turtles, delicious but expensive food and plenty of swimming pools. There's no Olympic complexes on the island but there's every other shape and size of pool. There's huge, meandering, resort pools, stylish and shapely infinity pools, tiny, private plunge pools, straight, long, lap pools and curvaceous, flamboyant designer pools.
The pool at the Beach Club where we stayed was a lovely 25-metre infinity pool overlooking Catseye Beach. At our very leisurely breakfasts on the terrace each morning, colourful catamarans would sail passed the glistening turquiose water in the pool. As well as being great for a float around and relax, the pool was a good length to swim laps. It even had a black line along the bottom of the pool, which kept me on the straight and narrow. Built around 2002, the deepest part of the pool is 2.4 metres, which levels out to 1.2 metres in the shallow end. If you lie low, the water in the pool and in Catseye Beach join up.
All the other resorts on the island have pools but the one that really caught our eye was at the newly-built Yacht Club Villas, next door to the Hamilton Island Yacht Club. This very curvy almost voluptuous pool stretches along the water's edge in front of the development's Jamie Durie-designed garden. At sunset it looked especially alluring with the fading light in the sky bathing the water in a pink glow.
The next-door Yacht Club, which was opened in 2009, includes a narrow 30-metre lap pool which sits underneath the wings of the Walter Barda-designed building. Dubbed the Opera House of the Barrier Reef, the Yacht Club is the baby of businessman and sailor Bob Oatley, the owner of the island. Whatever you think of the design, the club's top terrace was a very romantic spot to sip on champagne and watch the changing colours and shapes of the sky and sea at sunset.
