The Surf Yamba hotel review: this is not the new Byron
There are many reasons the owners of a new hotel in Yamba don’t want the NSW seaside town compared with its more northerly neighbour – and they’re all good ones.
“We will have that seafood platter for you at 3:30pm on the rooftop,” Gary Snodgrass tells one of his guests at newly opened The Surf Yamba hotel. He is midway through a conversation with WISH about the small coastal hamlet on the NSW north coast when he stops briefly to do his job.
“Sorry about that,” he says as he comes back to us. “We have the best views in Yamba with the pool and the lounges, and we often arrange for deliveries to be sent up from some great local restaurants to the rooftop terrace.”
The complete ease with which Snodgrass chats to WISH and to his guests as they come through The Surf Yamba is a good indication of the relaxed nature of this seaside town and of the fact that, despite a lot of press suggesting otherwise, it is never going to be the next Byron Bay.
“We don’t like that comparison at all,” Snodgrass says, laughing. “Byron is overcooked, pretentious and has lost its soul. Whereas Yamba is still a shorts and T-shirts type of environment.”
Snodgrass has been coming to Yamba for holidays for the past 20 years and moved in permanently this year to run The Surf Yamba hotel, the first boutique luxury accommodation of its kind in the seaside village. Like the town, though, it is small, offering only 12 rooms and no restaurant of its own, but the owners – brothers David, Andrew and Philip Mayne – have spared no expense in its design and construction.
The new hotel has the aforementioned rooftop with a plunge pool and killer beach views and the architects – Sydney’s Design King Company – were inspired by the ocean liners of the 1930s, so the building is curved and the interiors have Art Deco and nautical touchpoints. There is bespoke and handmade furniture, as well as limited edition works by Australian artists and Leif amenities throughout.
The Surf Yamba overlooks the main beach, one of several beaches in the seaside hamlet. Yamba is sandwiched between the Clarence River to the north and the village of Angourie and extensive national park to the south. On Yamba beach one of the best-located pubs in the country, the Pacific Hotel, has incredible ocean views and recently was the subject of a fierce – but failed – bidding war between hospitality moguls Justin Hemmes and Stu Laundy. Behind the beaches, on the Clarence River side of Yamba, is the marina, which has been the focal point of the town’s fishing and prawning industry for decades. Fishing has been happening since the 1880s and prawn trawling since the 1940s, and you can still get fresh prawns and fish from the daily catch.
“As kids when we went to Yamba there would be as many as 50 trawlers coming in every day,” Andrew Mayne says. “It is not as big now but you still get all your local Yamba prawns,, as well as the local fish. You have the restaurant The Prawn Shack as well as the fishing co-op, where you can buy it straight off the boats.”
Mayne and his family – who are graziers – have been coming to Yamba since the 1960s. His grandfather lived there for a few years and they would visit almost monthly. When the site of The Surf Yamba came up for sale 12 years ago, Mayne and his two brothers bought it and operated it as a motel, before completely rebuilding it and opening it as a hotel last month. “As Yamba has evolved I saw the opportunity for higher-end accommodation and something the town hadn’t really had before,” he says, adding that the food scene in Yamba has really changed in the past few years and visitors are now “spoilt for choice”. Nearby culinary highlights include Beachwood Café for its Mediterranean and middle-eastern inspired fare, Gather Café for breakfast and coffee, wine bar Paradiso and Larrikin for a locally sourced dinner, as well as Barbaresco, an Italian eatery in nearby Angora.
Mayne says when The Surf Yamba opened in November he was “quietly confident” that they were offering something visitors wanted, but he was still surprised at the positive reaction to the hotel as they are now booked out until the end of February.
And while he thinks the secret seaside retreat that is Yamba may no longer be a secret, he believes the small town will never lose the unique feel of the carefree beach holidays of his childhood. “I just love how relaxed it is,” he adds. “It’s still my favourite place in the world.”
GETTING THERE
One of the reasons Yamba isn’t the next Byron Bay is that it doesn’t have an airport nearby. The coastal town is situated roughly midway between Coffs Harbour and Ballina, which are one and a half and one and a quarter hours’ drive away respectively. The best way to get there is to drive. If you fly – it is a 15-hour drive from Melbourne – then you will need to rent a car for your stay to get the most out of the area.
We drove from Sydney, a seven-hour trip. For some that might seem long, but Yamba is not the sort of place you go to for a weekend getaway (although it is only three hours from Brisbane). It’s where you go for a week of laid-back calm and swimming at white sandy beaches with crystal-clear waters.
The drive from Sydney, however, is often anything but calming – especially in the summer holiday season. In the past , the trip north on the Pacific Highway was so stop-start and stressful you needed a week’s holiday to recover. Then you had to do it all again to get home. But that’s all changed with improved dual carriageways, more bypasses and the NorthConnex, which deposits cars from central Sydney onto the M1. And from there it’s smooth driving all the way.
The WISH team travelled in the new Audi SQ5 Sportback, which is not your run-of-the-mill family SUV. A sportback is like a hybrid between an SUV and a sedan. It has less of the boxy shape associated with SUVs, with a sloping roofline at the rear. It’s essentially a five-door hatchback – the sportback name is to differentiate it from a classic three-door hatch – but faster and sportier. And at this end of the market – starting at $110,900 – manufacturers prefer the term “liftback” .
And with a turbocharged 3.0-litre V6 diesel engine, the car isn’t just powerful to drive, it sounds like it is too. When you put your foot down on the accelerator the engine emits a deep baritone gurgle like
a European sports car, only those cool-looking quad chrome exhausts at the rear of the car: they’re fake.
What’s genuine, however, is how well this car handles highway driving. With adaptive cruise control and lane guidance, it’s not only a safer drive (and one that can keep you on the speed limit without exceeding it), it’s also a lot more comfortable. With blind spot monitoring whereby a light on the side mirror warns you of a car just out of vision, your focus is never taken away from what’s in front. If you venture onto some unsealed roads, the car’s adaptive suspension system automatically adjusts according to conditions beneath the wheels.
The SQ5 Sportback has slightly less luggage space than a standard SQ5, but only slightly. There’s plenty of cargo capacity for four people (510L) and their beach holiday luggage, and when you put the rear seats down that increases to an impressive 1470L.
WISH did the seven-hour drive to Yamba and returned two days later to avoid messing around with airports and delayed or cancelled flights, and to be honest as departure day approached we started to have second thoughts about spending so much time on a notoriously hectic highway over such a short period. But when we eventually hit
the Sydney Harbour Bridge, normally a sign that your driving holiday
is almost at an end, we just wanted to keep on driving.
David Meagher
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