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Published: December 17th 2010
We flew from the coolness of the centre of Australia to the warmth of the North East and picked up our second camper and home for the next 6 weeks. It was the same make and model as the first but older - much older. No more i-pod jack and CD player, we now had a cassette player. It was great, and most importantly cheaper but everything was older - from the engine to the bedding and crockery. We realised how spoiled we’d been with camper mark 1!
We soon settled in though and made the most of being in the biggest city we’d been in since Perth almost two months ago, I went shopping! As well as the essentials (new clothes for myself are essential right?) we headed to all the Op Shops (charity shops - Op stands for Opportunity) we could find to start our audio cassette collection. Even buying a great old school case to hold then all. They ranged from some ok motown albums, fabulous homemade compilations, to the not so great 80s compilation - we concluded that during that decade you made an album out of 3-4 hits and 10-15 fillers! Not great when you
have to rewind and fast forward to get to a decent track!
Anyway, our main reason for being in Cairns was to get out on the Great Barrier Reef and do some diving. In order to explore as much of the Reef as possible we headed out on a 3 day/2 night live-a-board trip. It was amazing. Over the 3 days we did 10 dives, our first ever unguided ones, just the two of us exploring the incredible underwater world. There was a great group on board, a real mix of people - aging from 14 to 60, various dive levels, multiple nationalities - fab crew including the French chef cooked us up some great meals and we only saw one other boat the whole time.
The reef itself is amazing with so many different types of coral - bright colours, completely different textures and sizes though the main reason we were there was the huge array of sea life attracted by the reef. During the dives we saw white tip reef sharks, blue spotted rays, a lion fish, sting rays - one without a tail, barracudas, giant clams, huge wrasse, grey reef sharks and the suitably titled
bomb head parrot fish - which looked as mental as the name implies and were just huge. We also saw our first turtles on a dive. Lots of them! Huge ones with shells over a meter wide, we watched some for ages, swam after others, saw them sleeping under rocks, cleaning themselves, eating and also swimming above us. Their silhouettes look fab, they really are so chilled, just watching them makes you feel relaxed.
A couple of dives were night ones, the second of which saw us jump into the black ocean while sharks were circling the boat. Small fish come to boat for the scraps from our dinner plates, they attract bigger fish who attract bigger fish who attract sharks! Grey reef sharks, saw about 10 different ones. After a deep dive we hovered under the boat watching them circling and hunting. It was just amazing and not in the least bit scary, they‘re just interested in their food and nothing else. They are amazing animals, it was one of our best dives yet.
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