Dent Island

I can't believe it's our last full day. We've had a great time and for two people who are not into water activities we have found plenty to do.

We booked Dent Island Golf Club for lunch and tour. For the morning we chose to visit the local wildlife zoo. It's a tiny little zoo where you can have breakfast and get a photo with a koala (for a fee of course). It would be a great place if you had small children as you pay once and can visit as many times as you like throughout your stay.

We wandered around taking photos of the animals. There are obviously well cared for but it still seems a little sad to see them penned up, particularly the wallabies and dingoes that naturally roam a wide area in the wild.

I was crouching down with my camera on the glass taking photos of the big crocodile and realised if he suddenly turned toward me, I would absolutely pack myself and lose at least ten years off my life. Thankfully he was very docile and obliging.

It was a great place to get a close up view of the koala. I love the look on their faces...the look of being in a drunken stupor. They look at you and I'm not sure the way they look at you is because they can't focus on you or they don't care.  You can't help but love a koala.

As I said, lunch was at Dent Island. This is an $50,000,000 golf course and it will cost you $200 (if you hire clubs as well) to play there. You would also have to factor in quite a few golf balls because if you go off the fairway you would be hard pressed to find the ball.

Lunch at the clubhouse was delicious and the views were spectacular. I have to say there was not a lot of conversation as it was very easy to be distracted by the view.

After lunch were took a golf buggy tour around the island. There is a concreted track all around the entire course. I can now see why it cost so much to build this course. We drove around to the back nine holes. I think they time it so there are no players on these holes during the time of the tour. Pretty happy about that, I'm not too keen about getting a golf ball in the back of my head because I'm too busy looking at the surroundings.

At one of the holes we stopped at, there was a bit of drama with the golf buggies. We pulled up on a very steep hill. The buggy three back from us didn't put the brake on properly before they went to get out and it crashed into the one in front.  There were some pretty grumpy passengers. The guide's reaction was interesting. The driver of the buggy that rolled into the one in front tried to tell him that the brakes didn't work. The guide very firmly said "there's  nothing wrong with the buggy". He didn't even go over to see if there was any damage...it must happen all the time.

There were no more dramas after that and soon we were back at the club house from where we were driven back down to the ferry dock. While we were waiting for the rest of the people to come down to the ferry, the ferry driver was feeding fish to get them to come to the surface. They were the beautiful fish like we saw out on the reef. You tend to think you wouldn't see them so close to the island.

Our day finished up with dinner at Coca Chu, a restaurant right on the beach. It's an asian inspired restaurant and the food was delicious. You are very spoilt for choice for good food on Hamilton Island. There hasn't been one meal we haven't thoroughly enjoyed.

Our final day will be breakfast with Rylan and Bella and then back to reality. It's been a great five days and it will be hard to say goodbye, but I see that Rylan has a gorgeous girlfriend, a lovely place to live, some great friends and a job he enjoys, so I'm happy to leave him with that.