Blogs from Great Barrier Reef, Queensland, Australia, Oceania - page 7

Monday-Saturday, March 1st-6th Leaving Sydney for Queensland - the Rainforest and Heron Island, Great Barrier Reef Saying goodbye to Peter was obviously filled with emotion. When you see someone every 10 -20 years, you always wonder if there will be a next time. Despite these thoughts lurking, we said the obligatory “you come see us” and vice versa, but you suspected . . . Peter was nice enough to take us to the Sydney airport and we left on a flight to Coolangatta - which is near Brisbane and for our trip to Queensland and the Rainforest in Lamington National Park. Our driver said it would take 2 hours from Coolangatta to take us to O’Reilly’s in the Rainforest -she underestimated the twisting turning roads that climbed into mountains. This Rainforest has this name for a ... read more

Today is the day I’ve longed for since I planned to travel in Australia - diving at the Great Barrier Reef! Based on the comments from Queenie, we’ve decided to join the diving tour with Silverswift. This particular tour takes visitors to three different reef sites, instead of the just one fixed point like most other tours. Depending on the current and condition of the day, the guide will pick three locations which will allow visitors to see the most of Great Barrier Reef. So we arrived at the terminal at 7:30am sharp to pick up our boarding passes. Boarding started at 8am and as usual, divers and snorkelers are required to sign their lives away before the tour starts. We did an introductory dive tour, which was just a brief 30 minutes diving time. However, ... read more

22/11/2009 - We woke up ridiculously early this morning, packed up our stuff and got ourselves ready to be picked up from our hostel just after 6AM. We were taken to the Pro-Dive shop where we would leave our luggage and collect our scuba gear to load it on the ute. It wasn’t long before we took the mini-van to the marina and boarded Scubrapro III. There were 32 of us in total, most of which were certified divers coming along to experience the Great Barrier Reef. Everyone sat down for an introduction chat as we left the marina and headed to our first dive site in the outer reef, it would take 3 hours to get there. After controlling my sea sickness pretty well for 3 hours the boat came to a stop and everyone ... read more

We have just returned from a two day dive cruise on the Great Barrier Reef. Neither words nor pictures can do it justice - amazing wouldn't even begin to describe it. The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest living organism, is visible from space, and is one of the Natural Wonders of the World. We were able to do six dives while on our cruise and we also enrolled in an Adventure Diver specialty program, where we took courses in deep diving, night diving, and navigation. The day after we arrived in Queensland, we took a two and a half hour journey to the Outer Reef. The water was beautiful and calm, and we spotted a manta flapping it's wings on the surface along the way. We arrived at the Kangaroo Explorer and checked into ... read more

On Monday, we went out to the Great Barrier Reef on the 'Silversonic' - a boat Tim chose because he liked the name. It took more than an hour to get to the outer reef and on the way we saw a humpback whale breaching on the horizon. We snorkelled three sites on Agincourt Reef. The weather was warm but a bit cloudy so the coral was not quite as brightly coloured as we had expected but we had great time exploring the underwater world and the visibility was excellent which is the main thing. Em actually found Nemo hiding in an anemone (i.e. a clown fish). Tim dived down and swam underwater with a turtle, which could have been any one of the six species, but we think it was a hawksbill. Some people in ... read more