Blogs from Great Barrier Reef, Queensland, Australia, Oceania - page 14

Right, The start of my australian adventure was a rather wet one in more ways than is obvious form the photos. We flew into Cairns after a stop over in Darwin (meaning we couldn't take advantage of the ridiculously cheap booze at the duty free in Singapore -not a good start Oz, not good at all). When we finally arrived in cairns we thought we were part of an australian iniitiative to give all visiting brits a taste of their history -in that we were treated live convicts. For the simple fact that we were brits, travelling to Oz with absolutely no intention of working and staying for 3 months we were subjected to the deep and probing force of the Cairns customs officials... welcome to the land down under. Being interrogated by an australian official ... read more

Alrighty then, our day of diving has come and is now coming to an end. It was spectacular. Since Daniel was snorkeling we spent a lot of this trip doing our separate things but I'm still gonna say "we" about everything. We got on our boat a little after 8 this morning and this part was really hectic because we had to get our rental gear organized on the boat. This meant getting everything we needed ready along with the other 30 or so people who were also planning to dive. It was pretty early for us and I haven't done much diving in a while plus everything is measured differently here so all I could do was hope that I had all the right stuff for me (which I did). It took about 90 minutes ... read more

After leaving Ayers Rock I spent the best part of two hours peering down from 35,000 feet on the barren expanse that is Australia's 'outback'. The parched red soil continued as far as the eye could see, before the view was eventually interrupted by a layer of dense cloud. We broke through that cloud with half an hour of the flight left to reveal that the terracotta soil had been replaced by a new emerald world of rivers, lakes and farmland surrounded by dense rainforest. We were descending into Cairns, and the Tropics...... Getting off the plane, once again the humidity hit us like a bucket of water, and as we moved from the cool interior of the fuselage to the warm and sticky climate of Queensland the moisture instantly formed on our exposed skin making ... read more

Awesome! I finally have some underwater photos to share! I got out to the GBR over a week ago and was fortunate enough to go diving 3 days - 8 dives! As you can imagine from the title, the totally awesome barrier reef was all about the reef and coral and VASTNESS and AWE of it all! I saw quite a few turtles, a handful of sharks, and some HUGE fishes! There were plenty of moral eels (love those creepy guys!) tiny nudibrachs and shrimp, and the schools of fish were overwhelming - in every direction - sometimes completely surrounding us! I have finally found my absolute weightless zen (neutral buoyancy) and have been super enjoying the feeling of complete weightlessness as an observer of this incredible underwater world! I did 5 dives in Port Douglas ... read more

Day 252 (04.12.07) Continuing our fun-filled Cairns style action holiday, today we would be taken beneath the waves to visit the famous Great Barrier Reef. We only had a day to see the reef and wanted to do a three dive day, only offered by about 3 of the seemingly hundreds of dive companies in Cairns. We went with another recommendation from Raging Thunder as everything had been great with them so far. Having had a bit of a nightmare with communication between various tour companies - it became apparent that our planned tour (kindly paid for by Ryan for our wedding prezzie) to Cape Tribulation had been booked and unbenown to us cancelled. This news came as a bit of a shock to us, however instead of our Cape Tribulation trip Ryan, we are thrilled ... read more