My mini gap year in (probably) the most extraordinary place on Earth

Times

17 hours ago

It's day four of the gap-year-in-one-week I'm sharing with my 18-year-old son, Rider, in Queensland and we're getting into our groove. Take two flights before lunch and you start feeling like blasé musicians on tour: 'Hello Brisbane, again! Oh hi, Hamilton Island — lookin' good!' We're in the southern hemisphere's largest island resort, 550 miles north of Brisbane, in the Whitsundays — the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef. It's hard to decide which Madonna banger best fits the bill: Into the Groove or La Isla Bonita: 'All of nature wild and free/ This is where I long to be…'
We're staying at the Sundays, a stylish boutique hotel that has just been fully refurbished to the tune of £16.9 million and has been open again for precisely 24 hours. Our twin room, home for two nights, is a lovely airy space with a big balcony overlooking the glorious Catseye Beach, an even larger bathroom and a Balearic vibe, despite the fact that Ibiza and Hamilton Island are more than 10,000 miles apart. My 'on-tour' stresses start to melt away and though we've missed the hotel's lunch window we eat a couple of burgers over the road at the Hamilton Island Resort Centre, where Rider confronts his first chip-stealing flock of laughing kookaburras; like a cheeky bunch of seagulls, in drag.
Fortified, we head off to collect a golf buggy — one of the only methods of transport on the car-free island — while kangaroos hop across our path. By the time we've done an island recce (it's gorgeous from every angle, a cross between The Prisoner-era Portmeirion and an animated Disney movie) the sun is slipping away. It's the perfect moment to arrive at One Tree Hill, on the island's northern tip, where buggies cluster nightly for chillaxed live music and sundowners, until a semi-acoustic cover of Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall ('Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone!') gives me and a similarly aged couple (on a mini-break from Melbourne, we've bonded while sharing a table) the collective giggles. So much so, indeed, that Rider escapes us to take sunset selfies for Snapchat, leaving the retro hits behind.
Back at the hotel dinner is a wow. The chef Josh Niland is an Aussie superstar — the 'fish butcher' and his wife, Julie, run Saint Peter, a Sydney restaurant widely regarded by critics as one of the country's best, while his CV also includes a stint at the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's three-Michelin-starred restaurant. At the Sundays' Catseye Pool Club, Rider says Niland's tasting menu is 'basically the best thing, ever'. From the batter fried wild fish tacos to the crumbed white Pyrenees lamb cutlets and their accompanying sides (grilled beans and pecorino polenta with the lamb, fermented pineapple hot sauce with the tacos) every dish sings. It's a great evening, with another early night for an early start. We're getting used to these.
• The ultimate guide to the Great Barrier Reef: everything you need to know
At the time of writing, two months later, our fifth day now feels like a fever dream. I had known for weeks that we would be joining Cruise Whitsundays' 'outer reef day cruise' and that if the weather was optimal we'd also take a 15-minute helicopter ride over the heart-shaped coral cluster at Hardy Reef. I had also known for weeks that, after the flight, we would be snorkelling and discovering the reef up close. Yeah, I knew all of this in theory, however, it wasn't until we were halfway through the two-hour boat trip from Hamilton Island to the reef that I thought, 'Hang on — where precisely are we headed? What will we see when we arrive?!'
The answer: Reefworld, a permanently moored pontoon 45 miles away from the Whitsundays. At this shimmering reef-side oasis, the weather is perfect for choppers and three soon appear on the horizon, landing on their own pontoons. I'm suddenly glad I haven't spent any time contemplating being in a helicopter above the Pacific, 45 miles from dry land, because once our Hamilton Island Air pilot, Luke, is swooping us over Heart Reef, breathtaking doesn't come close to describing being a human drone, observing the contrast between the endless expanse of ocean and the reef ecosystem directly below us. This high-definition ride is one of the greatest things I've experienced. I'm thrilled that Rider — 'co-piloting' in the chopper's front seat, next to Luke — has done this at just 18; doubly delighted to be sharing it with him.
Yet soon after we put on 'stinger' suits, flippers and snorkels and launch ourselves off the pontoon and into the reef, that amazing helicopter ride is memory-holed. While it remains one of the most extraordinary things I've done, being underwater in the Great Barrier Reef turns out to be at the next level. We've swum a couple of hundred metres away from the pontoon, mesmerised, punctuating the silence with an occasional 'wow!', when Rider turns to me and says: 'This is as good a place as any, right?'
• 10 amazing ways to see the Great Barrier Reef
I agree, so we slip below the surface, back into our parallel underwater world teeming with brilliant fluorescent fish and glistening coral. Here, Rider deftly unscrews the lid of the small container we've brought with us — and will take away with us too — while behind my mask tears flow; crying underwater is yet another new experience. My eldest son, Jackson, was about to embark on his post-graduation gap year when he died in an accident in September 2023 and now, as we set a tiny amount of his ashes free at one of the most extraordinary places on earth, Jackson's gap afterlife is just beginning. Kathryn Flett is spending a month travelling in Australia. She was a guest of Tourism and Events Queensland (queensland.com). The Sundays has B&B doubles from £430 (hamiltonisland.com.au)
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Read Kathryn's final column next week