The bay
Everything in Airlie Beach is within a twenty-minute walk of this door, and the two things that are not are a five-dollar bus ride.
Down the hill
Begley Street runs straight down to the esplanade. Four hundred metres, steep for the first hundred and flat after that. At the bottom is the lagoon, which is a public swimming pool on the foreshore, free, patrolled, and open from six in the morning. It exists because the bay itself has stingers from October to May.
The marina
A kilometre east along the front, or ten minutes on the bus. Boats for Whitehaven and the inner islands go out between seven and nine and are back between four and six. Book them in town or from the hall here; we have no interest in either and we will tell you honestly which operators our guests come back happy from.
Walking
The Bicentennial Walkway follows the water from the lagoon to the marina and takes half an hour at a stroll. Behind the town, the Honeyeater Lookout track climbs through dry rainforest for an hour and a half and is worth doing before eight in the morning and not at all after ten.
Weather
Dry from May to October, warm and clear, nights around 18 degrees. Wet from November to April, hot, with afternoon storms that arrive fast and stop fast. Cyclone season overlaps the wet; we have a plan, it is on the back of the room door, and in thirty-four years we have used it twice.
Getting here
Whitsunday Coast Airport at Proserpine is thirty-five minutes by road. Hamilton Island is a ferry and then a transfer and takes about two hours door to door. The bus from Proserpine stops on the esplanade; it is three hundred metres uphill from there, and if you tell us the time we will meet it.
