Cairns Hotels
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Queensland & the Great Barrier Reef
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Stepping off the plane in Cairns we were hit with a wall of heat and humidity. Cairns was a bomby 38 degrees and all sunshine!
After squaring away our gear at the dive shop we headed out to explore the citys boardwalks and partake in some local cuisine. We were very surprised to find that the beaches in the area were not for swimming:( Instead a beach front swimming pool known as the Espanade was the local hot spot.
As we got closer to the waterside we realized the swimming ban was for good reason, apparently there are a whole lot of crocodiles in the area!
Besides the crocodiles we also discovered that cairns had a serious bat issue. Seemingly unphased by the defening squeal occuring during dusk hours, the locals paraded about unbothered by the noise. Lucky for us the bats were the fruit type and were only attracted to the fig trees.
On the second day in Cairns we began the part of our vacation that we had been looking forward to since the words "vacation down under" were first uttered...Diving the Great Barrier Reef!
We enjoyed a 3 day, 11 dive adventure on the outer section of the reef and it was everything we had dreamed of and more. From the crew of the boat, to the friends we met on board and of course the diving this was as expected the highlight of our trip. Despite our horrible underwater buddy signaling techniques
and Andrews constant need to hunt for sharks, we managed to make it on all 11 dives and more importantly make it back to the boat all 11 times...barely:)
In this beautiful underwater world we saw everything from grey tip reef sharks to Christmas tree corals....well perhaps I saw a few more corals and Andrew got a little closer to the sharks....
Blue spotted Rays, giant Maori Wrass, schools of colourful fish in every variety you could possibly imagine, see fans, giant clams, Maori Eals, unicorn fish, and the biggest Puffer I could have imagined and tons of Sea Turtles all found their way into many of our dive adventures.
We even had the opportunity to have our first night dive and got to repeat it, solo, the next night! Ok admittedly we were a lot more comfortable in the group night dive...but regardless it was a very exciting opportunity. Our flashlights found many feeding Lobsters, and some large inquisitive fish found our flashlights..yikes! And when our flashlights were covered we could see hundreds of tiny eyes staring around in the dark.
I apologize ahead of time for my lack of stunning pictures. Any divers that read this will likely understand it takes a bit more then a point and shoot camera to gather fascinating underwater photos. And I should mention that any of the photos that look colourful on my site were very graciously given to me by our ships captain
Sadly after 3 days and a whole lot of sea sickness medication we were on land again and trying to rediscover our "land legs". One final night out with our new dive buddies was the end to our diving adventure. The next day we headed off to the Daintree area to see where the rainforest meets the sea.
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