Lizard Island rises from the outer Great Barrier Reef like a fortress of granite boulders crowned with native she-oak and pandanus. The fourteen-hundred-acre national park offers two dozen beaches, but most visitors gravitate to the western coves where the reef encircles the island in a living necklace of coral. You wade in from Sunset Beach or Turtle Bay and find yourself suspended over plate corals the size of dining tables, their surfaces rippling with damselfish.
“This is the only Great Barrier Reef island where world-class snorkeling sites literally begin at the beach entry.”
Credit: FlickrLizard Island
The island sits one hundred fifty miles north of Cairns, far enough from the coast that agricultural runoff never reaches these waters. Visibility routinely exceeds one hundred feet. You'll spot Maori wrasse with lips like inner tubes, clownfish ducking into their anemone fortresses, and if you're patient at dawn, manta rays gliding over the sandy channels. The famous Cod Hole dive site lies a twenty-minute boat ride offshore, but the house reef rivals anything you'll see with a tank on your back.
Most guests stay at the lone luxury resort, though campers can pitch tents at the national park site on Watson's Bay. Either way, you're sharing the island with monitor lizards, stone curlews that sound like ghosts after dark, and roughly forty other humans. The trade winds blow year-round, keeping the anchorage calm and the mosquitoes at bay. You'll remember the reef long after your tan fades.
