We were ushered graciously aboard. One attendant offered us glasses of champagne while another stood guard by the sliding glass doors that led into the air-conditioned interior.
His job was to push them open for us. He explained that this had become necessary because unfortunately the doors didn’t open automatically when you approached them, and some of their Japanese visitors would often just stand in front of them for whole minutes getting increasingly bewildered and panic-stricken until someone slid them open by hand.
The journey took about an hour, streaking effortlessly over the dark and gleaming sea under a brilliant sun. Smaller lush green islands slid past us in the distance. I watched the long wake of water folding back into the sea behind us, sipped at my champagne, and thought of an old bridge that I know in Sturminster Newton in Dorset. It still has a cast-iron notice bolted to it that warns anybody thinking of damaging or defacing the bridge in any way that the penalty is transportation. To Australia. Now, Sturminster Newton is a lovely town, but it astonishes me that the bridge is still standing. Jane, who is much better at reading guide books than I am (I always read them on the way back to see what I missed, it’s often quite a shock), discovered something wonderful in the book she was reading. Did I know, she asked, that Brisbane was originally founded as a penal colony for convicts who committed new offences after they had arrived in Australia?
I spent a good half hour enjoying this single piece of information. It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British.
From offshore, Hayman Island looks deserted, just a large verdant hill fringed with pale beaches set in a dark blue sea. Only from very close to can you spot the long, low hotel nestling among the palms. There is hardly anywhere you can get a good look at it from, since it is virtually smothered with what look like giant feral pot plants. It snakes and winds its way through the greenery: pillars, fountains, shaded plazas, sun decks, discreet little shops selling heart-stoppingly expensive little things with designer labels you’d have to carefully unpick, and indiscreetly large swimming pools. It was pretty fabulous. We adored it immediately. It was exactly the sort of place that twenty years ago I would have despised anybody for going to. One of the great things about growing older and getting things like freebie holidays is that you can finally get to do all those things that you used to despise other people for doing: sitting around on a sundeck wearing sunglasses that cost about a year’s student grant, ordering up grotesque indulgences on room service, being pampered and waited on hand and foot by—and get this, this is a very important and significant part of what happens to you on Hayman Island—staff who don’t just say “No worries” when you thank them for topping up your champagne glass, they actually say “No worries at all.” They truly and sincerely want you, specifically you, not just any old fat git lying around in a sun hat, but you personally, to feel that there is nothing in this best of all possible worlds that you have come to for you to concern yourself about in any way at all. Really. Really. We don’t even despise you. Really. No worries at all. If only it were true. I had my Sub Bug to worry about, of course. This huge great thing that I had lugged ten times farther than Moses had dragged the children of Israel, just in order to see how it compared with a manta ray as a means of getting about underwater. It had been quietly removed from the boat in its huge silver-coloured box and discreetly stored at the dive centre where nobody could see it or guess at its purpose.
“We have your Sub Bug,” said a voice.
“Ah yes,” I said. “Yes, the, er, Sub Bug. Thank you very much. Yes, is that all right?”
“No worries,” said the voice, “at all.”
“Ah. Good.”
“So if you like, why don’t you come down to the dive centre in the morning. We can check it out, see how it works, see what you need, take it out for a spin, whatever you want. We’ll just do whatever we can to help you.” “Oh. Thank you. Thank you very much.”
“No worries at all.”
The voice was very friendly and reassuring. My jet-lagged paranoia began to subside a little. We went and had dinner.
The resort had four restaurants, and we chose the Oriental Seafood Restaurant. Seafood in Australia mostly seems to consist of barramundi, Morton Bay bugs, and everything else.
“Morton Bay bugs,” said our smiling Chinese waitress, “are like lobsters, only this big.” She held her two forefingers about three inches apart. “We smash their head in. Is very nice. You will like.”
We didn’t like that much, in fact. The restaurant was very smartly decorated in Japanese-style black and white, but the food looked better than it tasted and they played Muzak at us. For a moment I felt the ghost of the old, naff Hayman Island stalking through its glamorously tasteful new home. The other restaurants available were Polynesian, Italian, and the one to which they gave top billing, La Fontaine, a French restaurant that we decided to keep for the last of our four nights, though we had nagging doubts. I tend to like local cooking unless I’m in Wales, and the thought of French haute cuisine transported here did not fill me with confidence. I wanted to keep an open mind, though, because as it happens one of the best meals I ever had was steamed crab and chateaubriand of zebu cooked by a French-trained chef in the south of Madagascar. But then the French had infested Madagascar for seventy-five years and bequeathed it a rich legacy of culinary skills and hideous bureaucracy. We decided at least to look at La Fontaine that night. As we prowled our way toward it, we traversed acres of beautifully laid carpet, passed grand pianos, chandeliers, and reproduction Louis XVI furniture. I found myself racking my brains for any memory I might have of perhaps some schismatic eighteenth-century French court that might have been set up, however briefly, on the Great Barrier Reef. I asked Jane, who is an historian, and she assured me that I was being extremely silly, and so we went to bed.
It is, as I have said, shaped like the front half of a dolphin. The body of it is blue, and toward the front there are two small yellow fins, one on each side, that can rotate through a few degrees and direct the Sub Bug upward or downward. At the back are two large handles that you hold on to as the Sub Bug pulls you through the water. Within reach of your thumbs are buttons that make the thing go, and control its ascent and descent. Inside the Bug is a cylinder of compressed air—a normal scuba cylinder—and this provides power to spin the two propellers that push the Bug forward, and also supplies air down a flexible tube to a free-floating regulator. A regulator is the thing you stick in your mouth that gives you your air when you’re diving. The point of this arrangement is that you only need your mask and flippers; you don’t need to carry a scuba tank on your own back, because you’re getting your air direct from the Sub Bug. The Bug is designed in such a way that you can set a maximum depth beyond which it will not go. The very maximum anyway is thirty feet.
Ian had received a flurry of faxes from Martin Pemberton about setting up the machine, and was pretty confident about it “No worries at all,” he said, and asked me what I planned. I said it might be an idea to take it for a shallow local try out before taking it out into deep water.