Hamilton Island

[Charl]

Hamilton Island arrived in the MSFS library.
A couple of hundred km down the coast from Townsville - I’d never been south of Cairns on this coast, so an adventure, then.
A nice extended scenery, and you quickly see that proximity to the Reef makes it a very popular tourist region.



We arrive out of Brisbane on our A320Neo



I’ve been to some large-city arrivals with far worse facilities: proper signage, easy welcoming flow to cabs, minibuses, whatever you need for land or water.



Or air: we are in a flightsim, and we need to explore.



Vehicle of choice is the MD500, couldn’t find a VH rego! So settled for a colourful one.



We drop off a visiting couple and pose for a selfie, then head north on a sightseeing trip - all very Queensland, stopping off at the Intercontinental on Hayman Island for a quick $100 burger.



Then without any particular destination in mind, bumbled north until THIS appeared.



MSFS is sometimes quite amazing, and you have to assume it’s stock scenery - in the middle, erm, edge of Nowhere. The structure is a couple of km long, what on earth?
Couldn’t live without the Interweb: a bit like Operation Overlord, you have no deepwater port?
Well just make one.
This exports Queensland’s coal to Japan, Taiwan, and Korea.
There are a LOT of coal mines in Queensland, and probably, untold wealth.

That ended the flightsim session, going down the Wiki rabbit hole and learning all about this amazing bit of Planet Earth.
Australia is a huge place, something close to 80% of the Continental USA, lots going on.
Mm lots of flightsim sceneries to be enjoyed...

[Splitpin]

Top work Charl .....the land of Oz is indeed an amazing place.

[cowpatz]

Who's scenery is that Charl? I have a freeware one but it's very basic.
Aussie is certainly a big place when you fly over it. On my flights to and from Singapore it was commonplace to fly across the middle....the GAFA. You could see roads that were perpendicular to our track that would be dead straight and stretch from one horizon to the other.
Interestingly Australia is wider than the diameter of the moon.....to give some perspective.

Back when the family was young, we spent a couple of weeks in the Whitsundays, at a place called Daydream Island. It was a mission getting to as we had to fly from Auckland to Brisbane then with Ansett up to Hamilton Island and then a boat trip to Daydream. Not great with 3 young kids.

[Charl]

Yes I can recall a similar adventure out of Port Douglas, years ago.
The little ones threw up in the boat.

As to the scenery: I have a bad habit of binge buying, and not cataloguing what I have.
I had to go looking for this one, and thanks for asking: I missed out on the second half of the story!
It's a bundle of Hamilton Island plus Reefworld by AUscene, very good quality I thought.
My copy came from Contrail.

Now I'll go explore the rest, this time in my trusty Aussie R44.