Diving in Cairns

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We arrived in Cairns late and made our way to our hostel. It was quite far from the centre of the city but it seemed like a nice place and they had a regular shuttle into town. It had a nice pool, bar and bistro but our room was disgustingly hot. Our air-con seemed to be blowing hot air and we lay awake sweating on our first night.

On our first full day we headed into the city centre to have a look around. The city itself is nothing special, it has a nice swimming lagoon on the esplanade which kids probably wee in but since it doesn't have any beaches it's the only choice, the beaches are located further north out of town. There are loads of tacky souvenir shops selling such cultural items as beer bottle coolers with topless women on and Koala Bears wearing rugby tops. We also went to the main shopping centre, mainly to enjoy its arctic air-con. It was 36 degrees outside. That night we had some cheap tea and sweated oursleves to sleep.

We spent another couple of days doing nothing. We did a few errands such as laundry and generally killed time. The most notable thing we did was make a surprise visit to the dentists. Lil had chipped a tooth which had a filling in it and it was causing her some discomfort and making her look like a gypsy with a big silver tooth when she smiled. It was an expensive trip, 120 pounds, but the dentist did a good job of fixing it.

There didn't seem to be much to do in Cairns itself, a lot of people use it as a base to make trips further north to Cape Tribulation and Port Douglas but we didn't have the time or the money. We did however book ourselves on a diving trip on the Great Barrier Reef, the worlds largest living organism, for our last day in Australia. We also rented ourselves an underwater digital camera so we could take some good snaps of marine life.

We were very excited about the trip, we had been told that the reef around Cairns was superior to that around the Whitsundays. It was Lil's first time and my second. We set sail towards the outer reef to a place called Oyster Reef which was to be our exclusive diving and snorkeling spot for the day passing a couple of tiny sand islands on the way. The water at Oyster Reef was perfectly clear with excellent visibility, perfect for diving, and from the boat you could see right down to the coral several meters below the water.

We were in the second group to go diving so we had time to do some snorkeling first. It was absolutely amazing, better than the Whitsundays and definitely worth the money. The area of coral was vast and the beautiful colours and shapes were alien as were many of the bizarre looking fish. We couldn't wait to get under the water and see it close up.

Our time came to dive and we were loaded up with all our equipment before going under. We descended slowly under the instruction of our guide and swam towards an area of coral, which looked like a multi coloured under water mountain. It was here we spotted some Clown fish (Nemo's) and after admiring them for a while we went further and explored some more of the vividly coloured coral and its inhabitants. We saw schools of brightly coloured fish. One of the most impressive things we saw was a massive giant clam, inside it was an iridescent blue and it shimmered like a jewel at the bottom of the ocean. It was over too quickly but it was an excellent introductory dive and we vowed to do more once in Thailand.

We were treated to a huge buffet lunch on board which included delicious fresh prawns and salads, a smorgasbord of culinary delights! After this we sluggishly got back into the water and did some more snorkeling. We swam quite far out away from the boat where we saw even more varieties of fish and coral and we enjoyed this underwater marvel for as long as possible. This was an awesome end to our stay in Australia and once back on terra firma we headed back to our hostel to back our bags ready for our flight to Singapore the following day.

Overall our Australian experience was a slight disappointment, we had expected big things and it didn't deliver as much as we had hoped. Saying that, the activities and trips we did such as The Opera House, Fraser Island, The Whitsundays and our dive were amazing and rank amongst some of the best experiences so far, the scenery and landscape in these areas are breathtaking and we will remember them very fondly. It was all the in-between time that we didn't really enjoy and there was a lot of that, it also cost us so we spent a lot of money doing nothing and we became frustrated. All the beach towns up the East coast are more or less the same and aren't particularly exciting, we now perhaps wish we had a chosen a different route than the one taken by everyone else and experienced some real Oz. Unlike South American towns where we would just spend the day walking the streets and be amazed at every corner these towns just lacked anything interesting in our opinion however the coastal regions out of the towns and the amazing islands of the coast are undeniably beautiful.

We are very excited to get to Asia and experience the strange once more.

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