A grown-up's beach holiday

ESCAPE the ordinary and treat yourself this summer to a beach holiday that offers fabulous sand, sea and surf and a whole lot more, writes Debbie Schipp.

Luxurious lounging ... while holidaymakers can enjoy 5-star luxury at The Beach resort, Cabarita Beach still retains the beach village feel it always had.

MY requirements for a beach holiday have always been basic: sand, surf, a bed, regular access to fresh food and water and a rusty pushbike for dashes to the service station for party ice.

Don't get me wrong; I love five-star as much as the next person. But when it comes to the beach, this child of the summer has never needed flash or fussy.

It took four days for my simple philosophy to be seriously eroded.

The rot set in at Coolangatta airport, with a limousine pick-up, and a leisurely 20-minute hop down the Tweed Coast to The Beach, a new resort at Cabarita.

It got worse when a woman arrived to treat me to an hour-long in-room massage.

By the time I'd nodded off at sunset in the spa after a day of kayaking and surfing, my surrender was complete. I could barely drag myself out for a three-course a la carte dinner.

By coincidence I had returned to the place where, as a child, my basic beach holiday requirements were honed.

Back then, our Easter tradition entailed joining two other families, piling an ever-expanding sweaty tribe of kids into a car that lacked air-conditioning, and installing the lot of us in two or three family units for a week of overdosing on sun and surf at Surfers or Cabarita.

The accommodation was functional rather than flash, and nobody much cared.

At Cabarita, it was inevitable that some afternoons would end at the Cabarita Beach Hotel, where the adults enjoyed a couple of quiet ones while we salt-encrusted kids ran riot in the beachfront beer garden.

The pub's gone now, and I had returned to stay at The Beach resort, its posh replacement.

Five-star and $70 million in the making, The Beach has 57 residential resort apartments over three levels, surrounding three warm and cool pools, tropical landscaping, spa, sun decks and
a swim-up bar. There's also a gym, and, if the couple of huge plasma screens in your apartment aren't enough, the residents' cinema.

By the end of the year, The Beach will have introduced a new version of the pub to Cabarita -- the $10-million Beach Bar is due to open next month.

I am in a three-bedroom ground-floor apartment; across the balcony and through the gate and I am on the sand in seconds.

Later, I settle on the balcony to drink in the view -- the surf artfully framed by a pandanus palm in the foreground -- and raise a toast to those days -- although now I'm drinking red wine rather than red lemonade.

It takes all of an hour to relax. And roughly 24 to become a local; once I wrench myself out of the light, bright luxury digs.

The Tweed Coast is booming; residential and holiday developments five minutes up the road such as the swanky Salt and Casuarina beach estates are testament to that. But the beauty of this place is that while I'm lounging in five-star luxury, Cabarita still retains the beach village feel it always had.

Within 50m on the main street there is a bakery, general store, fruit shop and supermarket stocking all the provisions necessary for holiday eating.

The butcher, naturally, has a mate who works on a trawler, which means he does a fresh line in seafood, including sweet Tweed River prawns.

If food preparation leaves you cold, there are a few handy restaurants and takeaways within stumbling distance, and The Blue Rose Cafe, which does a breakfast to rival any city brunch haunt, and boasts staff brimming with local tips.

On day two, when told we're off for a surfing lesson, our waitress says, to nods of universal agreement from the other customers: ``Is your instructor Glen? He's great. And hot. Buff.''

Twenty waves later, after standing up on the second wave, I'm pleased to report that Glen from New Tweed Coast Adventures is indeed a good instructor.

Oh, all right then: he's also buff.

But he was no threat to the natural beauty of the Tweed Coast -- from the dolphins that surfed Cabarita Beach most mornings to the bird's-eye view clear up to Surfers Paradise and back down to Byron Bay from nearby Mount Warning -- well worth the challenging round trip.

I'm scared that my traditional beach holiday might not cut it any more: I've been spoiled rotten by The Beach.

The writer was a guest of The Beach resort, Cabarita.

The Sunday Telegraph