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Published: June 12th 2006
Ah. Just come back from giving my sinuses a workout on the Great Barrier Reef. Cool, eh? Very tiring though. I had a two hour in the middle of the day, something I rarely seem to manage.
I think I left you in Airlie Beach where
- it is very hot.
- there are lots of very nice islands which you can sail around. It's very nice.
I though that the most ironic thing about Airlie beach was that I could find no evidence of a beach, just some saltwater swimming lagoons and a marina. I mean it was probably there somewhere but I wouldn't think to name the town after it, since the main attraction of the town itself seems to be a strip full of the obligatory backpacker bars. Hmm.
The sailing trip... Lovely. I went on the Hammer, a former racing yacht. Just the sun and wind and these and snorkeling and stuff. Got dirty and salty but it was a lot of fun. I even pulled on some ropes though the only work I had to do was sit on the topside of the boat for 'optimum weight distribution'. Perfect.
Airlie Beach itself was pretty relaxing, but I needed to move on since my deadline for getting the hell out of Cairns was 11th June I had to move on.
I decided that what I wanted to do (pretty much to the exclusion of anything else in or around Cairns, given my time limit) was scuba diving. This meant that I needed to sit in a classroom for about a day altogether and dive in a pool for about a day altogether before I got to go into the sea. But when I did... woah. I saw turtles, sharks, rays, cuttlefish, coral, big shoals of colourful fish, got followed by a fish that though it would get food, found Nemo and got swept through coral bommies. All big adventure. The best part: probably just the sensation of swimming like a fish. A big, ungainly, bubble producing fish that can only go underwater for about half an hour at a time (if you're an air hog like me), but it's still about as close as you're going to get.
I went on the three day liveaboard boat visiting various patch reefs and got about 9 dives in altogether, including my open water training dives. The sea was choppier than you would expect, I started to hate my wetsuit more than anything else in the world and it was very expensive, but worth it.
I'm now actually in Sydney, cursing the fact that the Queen's Birthday (a public holiday in Australia) is delaying my visa hunt. Grr! Also, the distance between Cairns and Sydney is about the same distance (latitudinally) as England and Morrocco, and you really notice after a flight. It's pretty cold in Sydney.
Catch ya later!
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Jacolai
non-member comment
Ah...
Ah, finally. I find it. This thing where you write. Pkay, so I could have just asked Louise earlier, but... I probably got distracted, or something. So. I'm glad you're still alive. Your blog is a treat to read. Have a 'nam flashback for me. The Horror...