Australia - East Coast - Cairns to Melbourne

Cairns - Diving in the Great Barrier Reef

My flight from Auckland left at around 6am, then after a brief stopover in Brisbane, arrived in Cairns early afternoon. Reasonably hot here for the middle of winter, but could be better. I spent the afternoon sitting in the sun, considering what to do here, and visiting various tourist information offices. By the end of the day, I had arranged a 5 day diving course: PADI Open Water. This would enable me to freely dive without an instructor anywhere in the world; just hire equipment and go. The course started the following day (my first full day in Australia).

The first 2 days of the course consisted of classroom theory teaching and pool training, teaching us fully how to use the equipment and underwater skills such as bouyancy control. This was fun to an extent, but the theory did drag on a little, not that it was in anyway difficult.

On the 3rd day we were taken out to the Great Barrier Reef in the morning aboard a small 2 deck boat from which we did 2 training dives into the open water. This was a much better experience, since we got to see plenty of marine life as well as do some training exercises. The exercises practised consisted of basics, such flooding the mask and then emptying it underwater, emergency ascent, using your buddy's air supply etc. A 'buddy' when diving is the person you dive with, as you mustn't dive alone for obvious safety reasons. The main dangers facing divers include decompression sickness (nitrogen bubbles forming inside your body) from ascending too fast and holding your breath while ascending, causing oxgen in lungs to expand due to rapid pressure change, badly damaging the lungs, often fatally. Number one rule of diving therefore: don't ever hold your breath. There's a bit useful/useless information for you depending on whether you ever intend on diving.
Later that day we were transferred to a much larger live-aboard vessel. This was luxury compared to all the hostels I've been staying in. That evening we took the PADI (professional association of diving instructors) exam; the easiest exam I've ever undertaken, especially as our instructor didn't care how much we cheated, so I should say it was more a group consultation of questions.

On the fourth day, 2 more training dives in the morning qualified me as a PADI Open Water Diver. We then had 2 more dives later that day where we could go in our buddy pairs wherever we wished without an instructor. This was a huge liberation as we could now explore the reef as we wanted and could see a lot more, provided we stayed within reasonable depths (above 18m). The use of the dive charts given to us as part of our training became somewhat important from here on, since one must monitor the amount of nitrogen building up in their system from specific dives, dependent on depths, times and surface intervals.

On the evening of the 4th day, I did my first night dive, accompanied by an instructor. We had hoped to see many white tipped sharks here, but we saw none rather dissappointingly. When shining a light on the smaller fish for a few seconds, you could witness one of the much larger fish eat it. It was a selective torchlight execution, but then some of them were going to get eaten anyway.
5 dives today, each consisting of about 30 minutes each. I had a rather large amount of nitrogen in my system and felt thoroughly knackered by the end. This activity can certainly wear one out if done enough and one isn't used to it.

The next morning (day 5) I started the day with a deep dive. This was to 30m, accompanied by an instructor. The aim was to responsibly muck around at 30m and experience nitrogen narchosis. Unfortunately, as we had to wait for a couple of slow people to descend, we didn't drop down fast enough and I had no effect. It is supposed to be a mildly drunk/relaxing/euphoric/tingling feeling probably similar to inhaling nitrous oxide now that I think about it. One interesting thing we witnessed however, was the instructor breaking an egg down there. The pressure kept the yoke as a little yellow ball which we could pass around. A safety stop at 5m was taken for 5 minutes on the way back up.
I did another 2 fun dives that morning, the latter of which I rented an underwater camera to take plenty of pictures. I have yet to see how they turned out.
Yes, I found nemo, or at least a family that look very similar to him. I also saw the very cool turtles, one reef shark, a few lionfish (do a google image search if you don't know what this looks like) and loads more fish, and marine life. There really are just so many variations of underwater species here. It's a completely different world which you can't fully appreciate just by watching a David Attenborough documentary. I would say that the Great Barrier Reef is one of those things you absolutely must see at some point in your life, even if it's just snorkelling. As a whole, diving is a very relaxing activity and incredibly interesting if in a good location. It is just very peaceful, colourful and interesting down there. Cheese alert: Life is definitely better, where it is wetter, under the sea. I will certainly be doing this again whenever I visit good diving locations in the future.

Whitsundays and Fraser Island

Brisbane

I will come back to these.

Sydney

I arrived here at around 8am off the night bus (12 hour journey). Very little sleep that night since air con had been stuck on all night and everyone was uncomfortably cold. Couldn't sign into the hostel until 1pm, so leaving bags in storage, I did a full day walk around the city. I went to the Sydney harbour bridge, on it, and across across it to the other side where great views of the Opera House and CBD could be seen. I also visited the Sydney Opera House. It is smaller than I origionally thought, though for some reason people were unable to enter for a look around, so I didn't see the interior. Over my first two days here, I spent my time in the city centre walking around all it's areas. Circular Quay, where all the harbour ferries dock, is the area between the Opera House and the harbour bridge. The CBD stretches out south from Circular Quay. The royal botanic gardens are a short walk from the Opera House (south east) and theres a lot of green parkland area around here. It's the middle of winter, and I could quite happily walk around the city in a t-shirt, during late morning and early to mid afternoon. I love the fact that I can sit outdoors in the parks and sunbathe while reading a book at this time of year. It must be amazing weather in summer, unless I visited on particularly mild winter days. I also went up the skytower here, which gives reasonably good views across the city. Sydney is a beautiful and busy place. It is a very multicultural city with a particularly high oriental population; mostly Japanese I am told. Many aspects of the city reminded me of London. There are also many familiar sounding suburban areas: Windsor, Paddington, Kings Cross and there's a Hyde Park here too.

On my third day here, I decided to visit the suburban areas of Bondi and Manly. Leaving the hostel in the morning, I was greated by a very friendly tourist offering me her 1 day travel card, as for some reason had purchased it, and was now leaving Sydney. This came in particularly handy today as I could now get any trains, any buses and any ferries for free, for the rest of the day. Grazie, dear stranger.

Started off by visiting the east coast beaches at Bondi. Good surf area and nice hot sunny weather. Bondi is an area with a few shops, cafes, a significant amount of residential housing, and a shopping mall, equal in size (or bigger) than the Oracle, Reading or the Galleries, Bristol. A 20 minute walk from this surburb centre are the beaches, with a scenic coastal walk contecting them. Next to the biggest of the beaches is a grassy park area and a long parade of shops with plenty of cafes, fast food joints and surf shops.

The next location I visited was Manly. This required the semi-underground train from Bondi back to City Central, then to Circular Quay, and a 30 minute ferry ride across the harbour. This place reminded me of a slightly lower class, mini Surfers Paradise. It contained a shopping precinct, with all the usual numerous food and beverage places, which spread onto the coastline with beach all along it and small population surfers trying to catch the rather patheticly small breaks.

That pretty much sums up everything I have seen in Sydney. I think I prefer it to Brisbane simply because there is seemingly a lot more to do here and it's a generally busier and more spectacular place.

Melbourne

Another 12 hour overnight coach journey from Sydney, and I'm now in Melbourne, at around 8am. Not once have I booked accomodation prior to arrival during my time in Australia and I'm having a flawless record of finding a decent enough place to stay, here being no exception. I won't discuss what I did on a day to day basis here, because most of my time was spent in and around the CBD. I visited the royal botanical gardens and very extensive surrounding parkland area. It's great having this much green space right next to such a busy centre. The Melbourne CBD feels busier than that of Sydney, but that may be because it is more compact. It is easily walkable, from one side to the other, in 15- 20 minutes. I visited the immigration museum, the national art gallery and many Starbucks and Gloria Jean's. There's a higher number density of coffee shops in the Melbourne CBD than anywhere else I've ever been. I saw the new Batman film on the evening it came out at one of the 5 cinemas within an easy walk of my hostel. Brilliant film, I thought.

On my fourth day here, I actually left the city. In a car I had rented for 24 hours, I went off to the Great Ocean Road, a scenic road stretching between Torquay and somewhere past the 12 Apostles; I only went as far as here, as it took me 5 hours of driving to get this far and I still had to get back. The 12 Apostles are large rocks sticking out of the sea on the southern coastline between Melbourne and Adelaide. Type '12 Apostles' into google image search to see what I mean. Anyway, this was just a half time scenic intervention of the best driving experience I've ever had. OK, so it was in a Mitsubishi Colt; a small, tiny-engined auto-fucking-matic. Car hire companies seem unable to grasp the difference between a manual car and an automatic car, which is a shame, because this pissed me off after specifically requesting that it must be a manual. The driving fun was therefore cut in half: I want to choose the god-damn gear you metallic bastard! But after learning the car's balance after half an hour of driving down this incredible road, I was able to really throw it around and thrash the engine half to death; it wasn't my car, I didn't care. The road is like a racetrack. So many bends of varying radii, chicanes and U bends, with rockface on one side, and vast oceanic expanse on the other. Unless I find better in Europe, I will have to come back here with something faster. Such a fun day. I could drive up and down that road every day for a year and probably not get bored. I was somewhat jealous of the drivers I saw in the Porsches and Subaru Imprezas. I must say, that this road is considerably more quiet than I expected. The only problem is, that you do often get stuck behind the slower drivers and have to pull up at one of the scenic viewpoints for a while to leave some room for another reckless (but safe!-ish) thrash. Having said that, I would have been far safer in something that didn't handle like a three legged dog on ice.

I'm now finished in Melbourne and I'm flying to Hong Kong.

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