What, I asked politely, was a Sub Bug?
A Sub Bug, he explained, was a jet-propelled underwater buggy sort of thing. A bit like the front half of a dolphin. You hold on to the rear and it pulls you through the sea at depths of up to thirty feet. Remember that bit in the movie of Thunderball? A bit like those things. Great for exploring coral reefs.
I’m not sure if that’s exactly what he said. He may have said “azure sea” or “limpid depths.” Probably not, but that was the picture in my brain as I sat in the blustery rain watching an escaped umbrella totter past the bandstand.
I had to try one. I said so to Martin. I may even have wrestled him to the ground and knelt on his windpipe, everything was a bit of a blur to be honest, but anyway he said he would be delighted to let me try one. The question was where? I could try it anywhere, even just in the local swimming pool. No. The trick was to get to try it in Australia, on the Great Barrier Reef. I needed an angle, though, if I was going to get some hapless magazine to stump up a trip for me to try it which, believe me, is the only way to travel.
Then I remembered my unfinished business in Australia.
There’s an island I had visited briefly once ten years ago in the Whitsundays, at the southern end of the reef. It was a pretty dreadful place, called Hayman Island. The island itself was beautiful, but the resort that had been built on it was not, and I had ended up there by mistake, exhausted, at the end of an author tour. I hated it. The brochure was splattered with words like “international” and “superb” and “sophisticated,” and what this meant was that they had Muzak pumped out of the palm trees and themed fancy-dress parties every night. By day I would sit at a table by the pool getting slowly sozzled on Tequila Sunrises and listening to the conversations at nearby tables which seemed mostly to be about road accidents involving heavy-goods vehicles. In the evening I would retire woozily to my room in order to avoid the sight of maddened drunk Australians rampaging through the night in grass skirts or cowboy hats or whatever the theme of the evening was, while I watched Mad Max movies on the hotel video. These also featured a lot of road accidents, several of which involved heavy-goods vehicles. I couldn’t even find anything to read. The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I’d written both of them.
On one occasion I talked to an Australian couple on the beach. I said, “Hello, my name is Douglas, don’t you hate the Muzak?” They said they didn’t, as a matter of fact. They thought it was very nice and international and sophisticated. They lived on a sheep farm some 850 miles west of Brisbane, where all they ever heard, they said, was nothing. I said that must be very nice and they said that it got rather boring after a while, and that a little light Muzak was balm to them. They refused to go along with my assertion that it was like having Spam stuffed in your ears all day, and after a while the conversation petered out.
I made my escape from Hayman Island and ended up on a scuba-diving boat on Hook Reef, where I had the best week of my life, exploring the coral, diving with a wild variety of fish, dolphins, sharks, and even a minke whale.
It was only after I had left Hayman Island that I heard of something really major that I had missed there.
There was a bay tucked round on the other side, called Manta Ray Bay, that was full, as you might expect, of manta rays: huge, graceful, underwater flying carpets, one of the most beautiful animals in the world. The man who told me about it said that they were such placid and benign creatures that they would even allow people to ride on their backs underwater.
And I had missed it. For ten years I fretted about this.
Meanwhile I had also heard that Hayman Island itself had changed out of all recognition. It had been bought up by the Australian airline Ansett, who had spent a squillion dollars on ripping the Muzak out of the palm trees and transforming the resort into something that was not only international and superb and sophisticated and so on, but also breathtakingly expensive and, by all accounts, actually pretty good.
So here, I thought, was the angle. I would write an article about taking a Sub Bug all the way to Hayman Island, finding a friendly manta ray, and doing, effectively, a comparative test drive.
Now any sane, rational person might say that that was thoroughly stupid idea, and indeed a lot of them did. However this is that article: a comparative test drive between an underwater propeller-driven, blue and yellow one-person Sub Bug and a giant manta ray.
Did it work out?
Guess.
The sheer fatuous unreality of the idea struck me forcibly as we watched the huge forty-kilogram silver box containing the Sub Bug being wheeled across the tarmac at Hamilton Island airport. There was, I realised, a huge difference between telling people in England that I was going to Australia to do a comparative test drive between a Sub Bug and a manta ray, and telling people in Australia that I had come to do a comparative test drive, etc. I suddenly felt like an extremely idiotic Englishman whom everyone would hate and despise and point at and snigger about and make fun of.
My wife, Jane, calmly explained to me that I always became completely paranoid when I had jet lag, and why didn’t I just have a drink and relax.
Hamilton Island looks like a pretty good example of what not to do to a beautiful subtropical island on the edge of one of the great wonders of the natural world, which is to cover it with hideous high-rise junk architecture, and sell beer and T-shirts and also picture postcards of how beautiful it used to be before all the postcard shops arrived. However, we would only be there for a few minutes. Sitting waiting for us at the jetty by the small airport was the Sun Goddess, which was the sort of glamorous gleaming white boat that James Bond always seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time on, considering he was actually supposed to be a civil servant. It had been sent to meet guests going on to Hayman Island, and was the first indication of how much the place had changed.
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.