Everytime we talk to someone that we haven't spoken to in a while they always ask, what is it like living on Hayman? What exactly do you do? So I figured that even though this is probably a wee bit late and that I should have written this months ago, I'd tell you what it is like, better late than never right?
Hayman is a small island, let's get that cleared up straight away, there are three parts to it, the Resort - where the guests stay and where we work, the Staff Village - where we sleep, eat, play, do just about everything and the Rest - the island is a protected environment and the majority of it is natural vegetation and wildlife.
Andy's day would go as such - get up (usually late except when he's feeling guilty and he gets up to go the gym or a fitness class), eat something at 'The Diner' - as an aside the diner is where we eat, we are fortunate enough not to have to cook, we have 3 meals a day provided to us by a team of chefs responsible just for feeding us - by us I mean the 250 to 500 staff that are on island at any one time. He then heads to the kitchen. He works at Azure, the restaurant serving modern Australian cuisine with a focus on seafood. So quite simply he cooks a lot of steak and seafood. There are a team of 5 chefs that work in Azure, between them they spend their day in the Main Kitchen (said to be the second largest kitchen in the Southern Hemisphere) preparing for the dinner service. They trolley the food on the 'Queen Mary's' to Azure through the tunnel system ready for service.
Despite what many of our guests think, we don't actually live in the tunnel system. It is merely a system of tunnels that link unattached buildings. This way things like moving furniture, large trolleys of food, tradesmen, etc can move about the resort without roaming through the resorts gardens.
My day is similar in that it revolves around dinner service. As 'F&B Attendants' (this is our title) we do split shifts, 3 hours during the day for breakfast, lunch or setting up the restaurant for the evening and then the bulk of our hours in the evening during dinner service. I work at La Trattoria, an Italian bistro style, themed restaurant. It is a busy restaurant with a crazy pace at times but it's really enjoyable and I have learnt a lot about 5 star service standards that I knew nothing about before.
So as we both finish work around the 11pm time, that's our day.
Now the most important part of the week, our days off and just what can we do on our days off? Well we're quite fortunate in that those in charge encourage us to use many of the facilities and activities on the island. There are a few exceptions, however, we can go to the retail shops, make use of the spa treatments, use the sports and watersports facilities.
Our staff village provides us with everything that we need, it has the diner as mentioned, an office filled with staff who spend their days trying to keep us all in line and organised!, they also run a DVD club which works like a video rental store, a cinema room, a corner store (selling all the essentials)including a post office, a staff bar 'The Sand Bar' which grosses the most revenue of any bar in the Whitsunday region would you believe!?!, a gym, a training room for scheduled fitness classes, a swimming pool and several laundries.
Probably one of the most popular things to do on a day off is go on a 'drop-off'. This means that watersports will take us on a speedboat out to one of the nearby islands/beaches and leave us there for the day to sunbathe, swim, snorkel, eat, drink and be merry! We arrange with them a time to come and pick us up in the afternoon and just kick back and relax.
The second most popular thing to do, and the one thing that makes us feel like we're living a normal life is dining out. We can eat at each of the restaurants in the evening and the Beach Pavillion for lunch and cocktails. The restaurants are our two, Azure and La Trattoria, and also Oriental (Asian cuisine) and La Fontaine (French cuisine). We're good at eating out, pictures attached!
The other option to get 'off the rock' as such is to head to the mainland for the day. Our boat takes us to Shute Harbour and we then bus in to Airlie Beach, approx. 20 mins. This way we can experience all those things we miss on the island, cafes, shops, cars, traffic lights... If you have a couple of days off at a time you can visit the other islands in the area, we're yet to do that, getting a day off together ...... another mission entirely.
So that's our life on Hayman, made up of eating, drinking, sleeping, scuba diving (sometimes), squash (occasionally), sunbathing (quite a bit) .... oh and occasionally work!
