Today was our first day at Hayman Island - www.hayman.com.au. We took the morning shuttle transfer there and began the final leg of our glorious honeymoon. Hayman Island is a private (read that, pricey) luxurious island of the Whitsunday’s. The resort is picturesque in every way and well worth it. The first thing you notice is their amazing pool! If I remember correctly it’s the size of 5 Olympic pools and can be seen from space. Before checking in, we had breakfast (they had chocolate croissants here, but not as good so it seemed as the ones from the Silky Oaks) and decided to shoot some pool in the library. The pool table is so large they had to take apart the ceiling to put it in after construction. (The things you learn during orientation). We also met our resident spider hanging in the hallway on the way to our room. The thing is huge! Australia has many of the worlds deadliest spiders, and prettiest if you could call a spider that.
Bananaramas – the best drink ever. We hardly drink, only on occasion and even still it’ll take me 3 hours to finish a drink and the experience is still not pleasant BUT if everyone served the Hayman’s Bananaramas I’d be an alcoholic overnight. We spent a great deal of the day relaxing by the pool and having their famous burgers for lunch (as suggested by the couple we met rafting) – famous because they’re $25. But they were good. =) We tried to take out these little rafts with sails things, but we weren’t able to because the tide was going out. What? Whatever! We were a bit irritated, but when we realized what low tide looked like we finally understood – the water disappears entirely for yards on end! WOW! You really have to check out our pictures to see what we mean by WOW!
We finished our first day with dinner at the Oriental restaurant, the Hayman’s Asian inspired eatery, where we had our mudcrab experience…
The Oriental restaurant is beautiful and has a view of a picturesque garden. We were one of the first reservations and were able to get one of the outdoor tables. Our server told us the specials and advised us that there was one mud crab left on the menu. Dallas and I sorta fought for it in the sweet way that we do – you can have it, no you can have it, well if I weren’t here would you get it? Well then you can have it…so Dallas ordered the mud crab and I ordered a duck dish. A bit of background, I’m Filipino and my mother used to buy live crabs for dinner when I was young. You could write a book on the proper way to eat crabs, how to dissect them to get the meat and all. Aside from king crab legs and whatever they decide to put on sushi or crabcakes, this is the first whole crab experience that Dallas was going to have (and the last). Boy was he in for it.
Mud crabs are huge, they were kind enough at the restaurant to cut the body for you into 6 pieces – they gave you crab shears and a little scooper – and the sauce was amazing. But the crabmeat was the kind that got stuck to the shell and wasn’t easily removed. Poor Dallas, I had never in my life seen him so upset. We’ve been through the chapters of our whole relationship with not a single fight – he has the most patient demeanor of anyone in the world and here he was on our honeymoon in the most misery I’ve ever seen fighting with this silly mudcrab instead of having a nice dinner our first night at the Hayman. What a sight! I’ll admit it, I did chuckle, more than once…My duck on the other hand was delish! So after ten minutes of this ordeal I – the one with the crab experience – traded my dish with him. He loved my duck, that was good, while I spent 45 minutes (mind you with experience) taking that mud crab apart before eating any of it and had gone through two washbowls…Never again…I won’t even tell you how much that one crab was (a hint: it was just as much as our dinghy rental the next day)! And to think – if they had two mud crabs left, we would have each gotten one!
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