Life of Riley!

---

OK, we admit it. Travelling in Australia is more like a holiday, and we're making the most of it. A return to more strenuous travelling is just arond the corner in the form of SE Asia and India but for the time being at least - we're living the life of riley!

Cairns is a pretty dull city in itself, but it is a gateway to the Great Barrier Reef. We booked a day trip aboard a boat called 'Ocean Free' which took us out to the reef near Green Island a couple of hours off the coast of Cairns. This has to rate as one of the best days of the trip so far. The crew - George, Gordon, Lee, and Andy - were the perfect hosts. They got to know everybody personally and were a really good laugh. They put many of our previous tour guides to shame. We'd already been snorkelling in the Whitsundays, so when Gordon offered us the opportunity to scuba dive the reef we thought it would be rude not to try it (despite the fact that a large reef shark swam past the boat during the briefing). There's a serious amount of kit involved with this, but once you manage to fight off the nagging voice in your head telling you to return to the surface for air even though there's plenty available in your tanks, its actually quite easy. We spent a few moments around the boat getting used to this, before venturing out into the coral reef with Goerge. This was a reef-tastic experience - we saw many things we wouldn't have seen if we'd have snorkelled alone. We saw some giant clams which slammed shut when you swam to close, we swam right down into one section of coral which felt very much like swimming through a load of tecticles made of sponge. Excellent fun. We're not PADI qualified yet, but we've got the bug.

We spent some time in the afternoon on the tropical Green Island before returning back to the boat to sneak in some snorkelling before we headed back to Cairns. Our our way back, the crew brought round some cheese, biscuits, wine and even some cake to top the day off nicely.

We booked this tour following the advice of our hostel, Tropic Days. This is a fabulous little place. Clean, the staff super friendly and the facilities excellent. All in all, Cairns was good to us. We're off to Ayers Rock now for some serious desert heat.

---

Photos

A Giant Clam!
About the size of a football

Green Island
Tropical paradise....if a little touristy

Ocean Free
Our boat for the day

Comments

[Max]

Holiday?
I'm outraged to hear that you think you're on holiday. Stop this behaviour immediately and get back to work.

[Uncle Ads]

re: Great Beardier Reef
Imagine how much better that snorkling would have been with a beard Paul (I nearly just sent that out with a typo that said 'bear' - brilliant). On a different note...grown a beard Love and hugs, Uncle A