A school of silvery baitfish curl in the current like an underwater glitter ball; black and white damselfish swish around my fingertips; a couple of surgeon fish — powder-blue dinner plates with bright yellow fins — dance a tango before me. I’m four metres underwater, but bone dry and in my dressing gown. This is bedtime at Reefsuites, a floating resort with a pair of underwater hotel rooms anchored inside Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Reefsuites are the show-stopping recent addition to ReefWorld 2.0, the £5 million replacement for the original ReefWorld pontoon, which was badly damaged during Cyclone Debbie in 2017. Floating alongside Hardy Reef, a fantastical patch of stag, brain and fan corals found 45 miles off the coast of the Whitsunday Islands, the project required reseeding more than 4,000 pieces of coral on to the existing reef face.
ReefWorld is extremely popular with day trippers — too much so. The journey involves a three-hour boat ride from Airlie beach in the Whitsundays on a three-deck ship packed with up to 300 tourists at a time. On the day of my (pre-pandemic) crossing the Coral Sea is so rough that even the staff are reaching for the sick bags.
When we finally reach the pontoon, everyone piles out onto 1,000 sq m of decking, about the size of four tennis courts, where they spend the next four hours. Hardy Reef is blurry with snorkellers, music blares and you have to queue for the loo, but at 3pm the day trippers depart, leaving 28 guests to spend the night, staying in open-to-the-stars glamping tents on the pontoon’s top deck or downstairs in an underwater suite.
Underwater hotel rooms are not a new concept — aquarium versions exist at Atlantis, the Palm in Dubai and Resort World Sentosa, Singapore; Intercontinental Shanghai Wonderland has a sub-aquatic offering; and the Maldives has a clutch of underwater spas, nightclubs and suites — but this is a first for the Great Barrier Reef.
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My room for the night (the size of a budget hotel room) is accessed via an 18-step staircase and comes with your standard en suite, a comfortable kingsize bed and simple but stylish decor: smooth white walls, fleecy navy blue blankets and fresh flowers. Less ordinary is the wall of windows looking out into an ocean with more than 1,500 species of tropical fish. Two wide glass panels are also set into the floor for the full Finding Nemo effect.
During the day, the space is lit by natural light, which casts everything in an otherworldly but instantly soothing blue. I press my nose to the glass and gawp at a confetti of frilly damselfish, coralfish, butterflyfish and wrasse, and stay that way, enraptured, for hours. I’m reluctant to leave for our communal dinner (served upstairs on the main deck and unfortunately timed at 6pm, so I miss the chance of an underwater sunset) but it is just about worth it for the zingy fresh food: flame-grilled prawns, Australian beef steaks, mountains of fresh vegetables and unlimited wine and beer. When I return, my room has been transformed from daytime hues to a psychedelic purple, thanks to some little LED lights embedded in my window frame.
With the water now free of human traffic (no more divers floating past and no more flippers dangling outside my window) and the moon almost full, the marine life is abuzz, with fish sweeping past the windows like meteor showers. Just before I nod off, a gigantic Queensland grouper skulks up to the glass to have a look at me. At least 6ft long, it fills the entire pane. With its grumpy frown, mottled skin and beady eye it seems positively prehistoric.
Through the night there are splashes and gurgles, bubblings, deep rumbles and low hums. My neighbours next door tell me they found the noises terrifying but I thought them better than any sleep app. The bed is snug, the temperature comfortable and in the morning, as I brush my teeth, hundreds of baby reef fish, spawned just three weeks earlier, nibble algae from the window frame.
For a few hours more it’s bliss. We overnight guests have the full run of the pontoon, a full-works breakfast and a great big empty ocean in which to play. I splash and swim and snorkel with one of the crew, and later stand on the corner of the main deck watching giant trevally fish snapping sooty tern seabirds out of the sky — it’s Blue Planet brought vividly to life.
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Lee Cobaj was a guest of Cruise Whitsundays and Cathay Pacific. A 14-night nature and wildlife trip from Brisbane to Cairns is from £3,299pp, including flights and one night at Reefsuites (flightcentre.co.uk). B&B doubles at Reefsuites from £496. For more information see queensland.com.
Three more hotels with underwater rooms
Conrad Rangali Maldives
The Muraka, a vast Indian Ocean villa, has three bedrooms, numerous living and dining areas, an outdoor deck, an infinity pool, a seaview gym and a lift that descends to a kingsize suite submerged 16ft below sea level. After dark, keep your eyes out for octopus on the hunt.
Details B&B for nine from £7,223 (conradmaldives.com). Fly to Male
Manta Resort, Tanzania
Pinned to the ocean floor 250m off the coast of Pemba Island, the Underwater Room, a solitary sea cabin for two, is the star stay at this conservation-led resort. Built from reclaimed wood, the rustic hideaway is set over three levels, with a top deck for stargazing, a sea-level living room and an underwater bedroom with windows on three sides.
Details Full-board cabin from £1,330 (themantaresort.com). Fly to Zanzibar
InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland
An abandoned quarry 20 miles from Shanghai might be the last place you would expect to find an underwater palace, but this 18-storey hotel, built into the cliff, has rooms on two levels beneath the quarry’s lake, which has been stocked with thousands of fish that drift past your bedroom window.
Details B&B underwater suites from £1,597 (ihg.com). Fly to Shanghai Pudong
Travel restrictions are in place. See gov.uk for details
