Residents have no proper lingerie shop in the Whitsunday region

Finding nice lingerie is an impossible mission in a Whitsunday tourism hotspot, with some locals admitting to using togs instead of underwear when there’s no other options. VIDEO

The Whitsunday region offers luxury cruise experiences and is a dreamy and sexy holiday destination to many, but there’s another side to it when you settle down in the region for more than a couple of weeks and have to find solutions for some of your basic needs.

And struggling to stock up on proper underwear is one price to pay when you live in the beautiful Whitsundays.

The countless souvenir shops and clothes stores on the walk down to Airlie Beach offer a myriad of options for togs, but there are very limited options for bras and panties.

The Cotton On shop in town might have a display of 10 to 15 options for swimmers, but no underwear.

Italian backpacker Giulia Manzoni, who has been in Proserpine for the past four to five months, said the only place she could find underwear was Big W.

While another backpacker from Victoria, Maya Jones, said that she had anticipated to have enough “stock” before moving up to the area.

So, if people have not prepared for the ordeal as well as Maya, are they then saying goodbye to proper lingerie?

Airlie Beach resident Chelsea Rhodes said the only option for underwear in Airlie Beach was buying it from the surf shops, but that it was “really expensive”.

While Mount Marlow resident Lydia West told this publication that buying underwear online means “you take the risk that it won’t fit”.

Cannonvale local Tigermia Lee said if the area was to get a specialised shop for underwear, she believed all community members would rush there to stock up.

“When I first moved here there was Cotton On Body, and it was always packed,” Ms Lee said, adding that now the shop had been replaced by another store.

Ms Lee said she has on occasions ended up wearing her togs as underwear as she could not find anything that was “decent” and “comfortable”.

“Now, I either look online or I go to Mackay or even Rocky, or when I’m travelling I get some underwear from there,” she said.

“You got to travel so far just to get bloody underwear.”

Part of the problem probably lies in a lack of demand in a holiday hotspot, where most tourists aren’t going to buy underwear as a souvenir and probably don’t stay in the area long enough to even have to consider the issue.

Owner of Asian Products on the Go, Myrna Hold, and local resident for more than 35 years said the population of people living long-term in town “was not big enough to cater” for a market like lingerie.

Ms Hold said, with a smile, while a new underwear shop probably won’t come all the way to town, she understood younger women wanted to “look nice”.

“If there was a new store in town, they would love that, I bet,” Ms Hold said.