Breakfast at Azure Restaurant, Hayman Island, Australia
The view from our breakfast table at Azure.
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Food on Hayman Island was absurdly expensive. I plan on writing an entire post about it, but it actually causes me physical pain to think about the prices of our meals there, so I’m procrastinating on that.
Breakfast, however, was included with our stay, so we gorged ourselves every morning. The buffet was expansive, and beautifully laid out.
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They even had a honeycomb in a wooden frame, from which you could get honey. This was all a bit showy for me (I prefer my honey is a little plastic bear, thank you very much), but I appreciated it nevertheless.
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The restaurant, Azure, was right on the beach, with massive glass doors that could be opened up entirely. Every morning, we’d sit and look at the water as the sun began to creep over the hill, and eat pancakes with butterscotch syrup (whoever came up with the idea to pass dessert off as breakfast food is a friggin genius).
I added some blueberries in a half-hearted attempt to be healthy.
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We’d sip our cappuccino and tea on the beachfront deck and talk about what we wanted to do that day. Things were very nearly perfect.
And he was stupidly handsome.
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Except for the goddamn birds.
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When we first saw them, we were somewhat delighted. Look! Cockatoos! And they come right up to you!
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Soon, though, their fearlessness became unsettling. They’d land on tables, swiping sugar packets and little plastic containers of jam.
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If you turned your head away from your food for just a few seconds, your croissant or slice of toast would suddenly take flight in the beak of one of these winged thieves.
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Sometimes, they’d leave you something in return.
Awww! A pile of crap! How’d you know?
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“Careful,” one of the staff warned. “They have the intelligence of a four-year-old human.”
She offered no follow-up to this comment. I was suitably terrified (the birds were each roughly as long as my arm). Another explained that since the birds were swiping sugar packets out of the porcelain bowls on the tables, the management decided to order lids for the bowls.
“What happened?” I asked.
“One bird figured out how to get the lid off in about two minutes. Now they can all do it.”
I shuddered. Looking around, I realized we were outnumbered.
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It was like … (crap, I hate to draw such an obvious parallel, but …) it was like a scene from The Birds.
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You could tell how long a guest had been at Hayman by their reaction to the birds. Delight and amusement? Usually no more than 1 day. Slight annoyance?2-3 days. Crazed horror or on the brink of avian homicide? 4 days and up.
After a while, we simply tried ignoring our feathered nuisances. We ate our breakfast and pretended that everything was fine. And most of the time, it was.
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But every now and then, I’d get the creepy feeling that I was being watched …
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In the end, the birds managed to steal their fill of breakfast. It seemed only fair – they were on the island first, after all. We’d invaded their home. We’d no right to complain, to wave our arms at them, screaming “SHOO! SHOO!”. Though in fairness, whenever anyone did that, the birds sat, unperturbed, and continued munching on pilfered pastries.
Still, we figured we were entitled to a little peace, given how much we were shelling out to stay on Hayman. So you can imagine my relief when we returned to our little cabana room and found that there were no birds there.
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Until one morning …
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Goddamn birds. I should have made them pitch in on the nightly rate.
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