Living the Keppel Dream

Friday morning, 5:30am....up, packed and in the car by 7am to get an early start to the day. We drove 3 hours east to Rockhampton and then another hour east to the coastal town of Yeppoon. This is where we left the car and caught the 11:30am ferry over to Great Keppel Island. The boat ride was only 30 minutes but VERY choppy and I felt just a little seasick. We arrived to clear blue water and beautiful white sand, unpacked our esky (cooler) and tupperware of food and got straight out to the beach. We stayed in a little house with a full kitchen and air-con....so lucky!

The beach facing mainland is the strip of beach where all the accomodation is located. The island used to be a Contiki (age-18-35) holiday resort but is now called Mecure resort (although it seemed to be contiki this weekend as a group of 200+ University students were staying there). Our accomodation was located at the other end of the strip of beach (about 10 minute walk)...Keppel Haven. There were hiking trails all around the island and access to different beaches and so took advantage of that, although didn't go too far off.

We enjoyed swimming in the clear blue waters but were all a little nervous as it was still "stinger" season with the jelly fish. Tons of people were swimming and snorkelling without stinger suits and so I guess if you can't beat 'em..join 'em. We are all safe, no stings!

We rented snorkelling gear for 2 days (and stinger suits...safety, safety!) and got around to the reef area of the island. We saw tons of sting rays, colourful fish, a huge purple clam and Brendon and I were lucky to see a sea turtle swimming.

Just outside our little beach house we witnessed some neat wildlife...kookaburra, lorikeets, guanas and possums. The lorikeets were VERY tame (as I'm sure everyone feeds them) and it seemed like they would come right into the house if we left the door open.

I'm going to ask Brendon to do a post about the Sea-Spi boats that we were lucky enough to try out. So he will give you his take on the island. Now it's back to working hard!