Daydream Island is in the Whitsunday group and seems to be nothing more than a small island containing a hotel and sports facilities. Coming out on the ferry yesterday morning, it was a bit like arriving on Fantasy Island and I half expected Tattoo to be waiting for us on the jetty. Compared to the challenges of Fraser Island, our two days on Daydream have been all about relaxing - in fact, it's felt something like a good old fashioned Butlins family holiday complete with cabaret.

The hotel has a private beach called Sunlovers, but our coach captain admits that it isn't exactly easy to locate and that he had been coming here for quite a while before somebody showed him how to get to it. It doesn't help that neither of the two lifts (elevators, if you're American) seem to be able to agree on what the floors are called - asking Lift 1 to take you to the second floor results in you coming out into the same place that Lift 2 takes you to if you ask it for the third floor. Given that the hotel brochure says the entrance to the private beach is on the third floor, this causes some confusion to start with. In the end, after asking several people who weren't even aware that there was a private beach, it turned out that the entrance was on the fourth floor - somewhere that it seemed almost impossible to get the lift to go to at all. The walk to the beach involved a stroll along a boardwalk through a wooded area which emerged onto scorching sand on the hottest side of the island. The confusion concerning the beach seems to be something of a blessing in disguise as it eventually meant that I was able to enjoy the afternoon laying on the white sand turning a nice shade of brown without having sand kicked in my face by the profusion of young children that seem to be staying here at the moment. The hotel had provided snorkelling equipment which also meant that I was able to lay face down in the shallows for a while looking at the multicoloured fish, which would've been slightly more pleasant had it not been for the fact that I became far too fascinated by the way the little yellow ones crowded around my fingers that I forgot where I was and managed to cook my back quite nicely.

Yesterday evening, there was an expensive looking cabaret show in the bar involving fire breathing and more Polynesian dancing girls - they seem to be particularly hung up on pretending we're not in Australia over here. In fact, at dinner we had all been adorned with Lei (Hawaiian style flower rings which they hang around your neck) and filled with wine so that we were all well into the spirit of things by the time the entertainers started inviting members of the audience to jump through rings of fire or get hypnotised into squawking like chickens. There were some red faces, not to mention noses in the morning, that's for sure.

Us younger members of the coach party quickly discovered that the island's nightclub would only be open for one night while we were there and so we made our excuses as soon as we could after the show and headed towards the other end of the island. Along with two of my friends from the coach, Debbie and Jan, I was accompanied by three new blokes who had joined the tour over the last couple of days and were having trouble keeping their drooling under control whenever Debbie was around. On our way to the club, we also bumped into Lisa, the hostess from the coach, who made the group up to seven. Unfortunately, it seemed as though the island had been taken over by a wedding party and the club was full of the guests - and they were all apparently too stuck up to have anything to do with us, so we ended up sitting at a table in the corner trying to talk over the music and wondering if there would ever be a spot free on the dance floor for any of us to occupy. I was starting to get the impression by this point in the trip that cracks were appearing in some of the friendships formed between the younger members of the group - it seemed as though, individually, everyone was happy to chat away all night, but put us all together and we just sat around glaring at each other and doing that awkward thing where you start a sentence, see someone looking at you funny and think better of it. Part of the trouble, of course, was that all of us men openly fancied Debbie and were starting to do pretty good impressions of apes around her - so unless she suddenly did something incredibly unlikely like stand up over dinner, fling her clothes off and shout "right, who wants me first?", I guessed that you would probably soon be able to cut the sexual tension with a knife. I expect she was enjoying every second of it.

The Whitsunday Islands, which include Daydream, are really the holiday destination for many people on the Gold Coast, providing perfectly white sandy beaches untouched by fast food wrappers. Naturally, actually staying on the Islands at somewhere such as the Daydream Island Resort isn't cheap by any means, but once you're there you can literally forget about the outside world and laze about on the beach all day. There are seventy-four islands in the group, a lot of which rarely see a human being, and it was some of the less inhabited ones which I would have liked to have seen.

Instead, our stay on Daydream included a tour of some of the more "tourist-ready" islands. Setting out from the resort's jetty, our boat first sped off to Whitehaven Beach, the most popular beach on Whitsunday Island. Locals will tell you that Whitehaven is the most perfect beach in the world - which of course is what you hear from locals the world over about their local beauty spot - but although I probably wouldn't go quite that far myself, having been to some of the more perfect beaches in Thailand, at least it does have the distinction of being the only beach on Whitsunday Island which the public is allowed to visit. The rest of the island is a National Park and they are very careful about who they let tramp around over there. Sound familiar? I can almost hear Leonardo De Caprio heading this way with a whole bucketload of cash to see if Hollywood can change their minds...

Our boat wasn't allowed to land, so we were shuttled onto the beach a few at a time on a raft. The sand was, indeed, so soft that it almost ran through my fingers before I'd picked it up - but there wasn't time to play with sand because we were followed from the boat by a fully stocked minibar and sporting equipment and before I knew it we were all very drunk and splashing about in the ocean trying to play some form of bizarre water cricket. I thought about putting on my best James Bond voice and chatting up two gorgeous Scandinavian girls who had joined us on the trip, but getting out of the water I discovered to my dismay that I had been attacked by sand flies. Now, this is unusual for me - as a general rule, I'm one of those people who can be locked for days in a room full of mosquitoes and come out without even a single bite. But apparently, whatever it is that mosquitoes hate about me is incredibly exciting to a sand fly because I was suddenly covered from head to foot in little red marks which were very itchy and made me look like an extra from some horrible medical disaster movie. Not feeling particularly suave any more, I decided to make do with topping up my tan but by the time I got around to laying out my towel, slapping myself with sunscreen (or should that be slopping?) and settling back to bake, we were already being called back onto the boat. It seems that any one tour party can only occupy this particular three mile stretch of Whitehaven beach for an hour, and I could already see the next boat arriving. Spoilsports!

After we had emptied the mini-bar and baked ourselves to a frazzle on the white sand of Whitehaven, we piled back on board the boat and moved on to the most commercial of the Whitsunday islands, Hamilton. While the boat was moored at the jetty, everyone went off to look around and then returned fifteen minutes later to stuff our faces full of a buffet lunch on board. You're probably getting a rough idea of what the Whitsunday Islands are all about by now, aren't you - lay on a beach, get a drink from the bar, stuff your face and go back to the beach again. After lunch, a bus had been laid on to take us on the grand tour of Hamilton Island, but this didn't take a particularly long time as you can only actually go for a maximum of three kilometres in any direction before falling in the sea. There aren't supposed to be any mainstream vehicles on the island, the primary mode of transport - other than walking - being to get in your little golf buggy and zip around in that. If it was down to me, I would ban transport on the island altogether for everybody except those with disabilities - if there's ever going to be an example of a place where putting down tracks for buggies is just taking up what limited space there is available and people should just be made to get off their backsides and take a short stroll to their destination, Hamilton Island has got to be it. Or perhaps, since the only thing to do there is lay on the beach all day, none of the permanent residents are fit enough to walk further than the nearest stretch of sand!

Unlike some of the other islands, Hamilton is very commercial, being absolutely covered in hotels, shops, bars, cafes and anything else that the average holidaymaker is likely to want. Of course, all these things take up space that they haven't got, so it isn't difficult to argue that the island would be a lot more like paradise if they just plonked down one large cafe and a couple of hotels and left the rest to be covered in forests and white sandy beaches. But what do I know? Although the island is primarily a resort, there is still plenty of housing for those with the odd few million dollars to spare. Among the celebrities who have lived on the island over the years are the late George Harrison of the Beatles and motor racing star Jackie Stewart. Harrison's house, in particular, is a superb exercise in the sort of flamboyance you can only get away with if you've got enough money to buy your own bank. Not only does the outdoor swimming pool actually pass through the wall into the house itself, but there's a small bridge over it for crossing from one side of the room to the other - Olivia Harrison, George's wife, has been quoted as saying that he always wanted to walk on water and this was the only way he could think of to make his dream come true. The house, which can be seen way up on a cliff making its presence known to everyone sailing past, is called "Letsbeavenue", proving that George certainly had a sense of humour.

The entertainment on our final night was slightly on the surreal side. We had been promised Toad Racing, which as you can imagine had been intriguing us all day. In the event, however, it appears that either nobody had been able to find any real toads or that everybody was just feeling particularly lazy that day, because what we found when we got downstairs was a large table on which had been placed six stuffed frogs. We then sat around for the evening betting on these creatures and feeling ever so slightly stupid while somebody shook a dice and physically moved them across the table towards the finishing line. If it weren't for the fact that this is clearly a very important local tradition and people were eagerly waving fifty dollar bills in the air and screaming "Come on, Croaky" at the stuffed frogs, I would've gone to bed a lot earlier... but I can honestly say that there was something totally mesmerising about watching grown men betting on stuffed animals. Eventually, after everybody had got fed up with the toad racing, the resident band appeared in the lounge to keep us entertained into the night. People started to drift off to their rooms, but us youngsters weren't about to let the night come to an end - we were moving on to pastures new in the morning and wanted to make sure we got our moneys worth from the band before we did. By the time the band started to realise that we weren't going to stop dancing any time soon, all but about eight or nine people in the lounge had departed and it was only us and a few other stragglers left - and we had no intention of going anywhere. We formed a small group near the stage and made it quite clear that we weren't going anywhere until our legs gave way beneath us. At around one in the morning, the band had finally had enough and cleared off, leaving us sitting around in a silent, empty room thinking that this simply wasn't good enough...

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months