Lady Elliot Island is a coral quay on the south end of The Great Barrier Reef. The tiny island has featured on an episode of David Attenborough’s TV series, Great Barrier Reef not only because of the bird life, turtles and manta rays there but also because it is a conservation success story.
Where is Lady Elliot Island? Zoom in on a map of Australia. Find Hervey Bay in Queensland. Lady Elliot Island lies 1230 km NE of Hervey Bay.
Just getting there was an adventure for us. We flew all day from Perth in Western Australia to Brisbane in a Boeing 737 (comfort and movies) then boarded a turbo prop aircraft to reach Hervey Bay (rattling and sandwiches). Then the planes got even smaller. We flew out from Hervey Bay on a Beechcraft B 200 and returned on a Cesna 210 Centurion.
In the the photo below you can see the navigating thingy-gum. It shows our position and the red line shows our flight path. Yes, we were right behind the pilot.
Our flight from the coastal town of Hervey Bay to Lady Elliot Island took 80 minutes. We headed out over the sea and then northerly between the mainland and K’Gari Island, the big one in the distance (below). It’s the largest sand island in the world.
Beyond Fraser Island is The Pacific Ocean where the turtles roam for years on the currents after laying their eggs on Lady Elliot and on many other islands of The Barrier Reef. Just look at those blues!
The colours and swirls and patterns of coastal seas are just too blue for words. And these pics were taken through slightly fuzzy perspex windows. In fact they looked even bluer. We flew past K’gari (formerly Fraser Island) and had a good view of the little islands and sand banks too.
See that little island in the foreground of the picture above? Imagine an island like that all for oneself. You could just sit there in the shade by the sand all day simply being stunned by the colours of the sea. Cyclones could be a bother though.
Thar she blows! Lady Elliot Island hoves into sight (above). You can see the main coral reef where the deep dark blue ocean is breaking to white tops. Within the reef lies the lagoon. You can do reef walks at low tide and snorkel there at high tide. You see green turtles and reef sharks and all kinds of starfish and fish and lots of coral. The island is so small that, as you can see, the airstrip goes right across the middle, one side to the other.
If you look through the blur of the propellor (above) you can see two bands of blue at the end of the landing strip? That’s the lagoon, and after the lagoon you see the dark deep blue of the Pacific Ocean. We were later to see turtles right there where the runway strip ends.
And there is the Eco Resort on Lady Elliot Island. It’s deliberately low key and low impact. No vehicles other than for the staff to do their work. The staff are very involved in caring for the island. They are always planting more trees and counting the birds nests and the turtle nests
The island was actually a conservation disaster until some decades ago, and since then it has been restored tree by tree. More about Lady Elliot Island in future posts.
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Mark is guardian and blundering typist for Mawson, one of this bright world’s few published bears. Of Mawson’s first book, ‘It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In’, a reviewer said, ‘Reading this book is like receiving a great big hug of reassurance and a huge hot chocolate with fluffy marshmallows.’
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