Blogs from Heron Island, Queensland, Australia, Oceania

Heron island has better beaches than Lady Elliot witch we took use of on our first day. Being out on an island like that is really relaxing. You don’t have to worry about getting lost, because there is not that much space to get lost on, you don’t have to be stressed about time, because let’s be honest you are not going anywhere and you do not have any cellphone reception. We spent the day snorkeling, sunbathing and walking around on the island. In the evening, about an hour after the high tide (I am not sure exactly because I was not wearing a watch) we went for a walk around the island to see if we could find a turtle. After walking around for a little while we managed to find a turtle laying eggs ... read more

Sunday/ Monday October 8th-9th The Sunday night before we left we were given permission to go over to the resort and hang out at the bar/ rec room. They had live entertainment. It was a couple with a guitar playing some throw back classics, they were actually quite good. There were a couple of pool tables and a giant chess board outside. I played a game of pool against a couple resort guests, an eight year old girl and her mom. Let me say it was a pretty evenly matched game with due to my amazing aptitude for the game of pool. In Australia they do not label the pool balls by stripes or solids but by bigs and smalls, I was quite confused by this for the first couple minutes of the game. That night ... read more

Tuesday October 2nd Tuesday night at 11:30 PM the bus rolled out of the UQ parking lot making the beginning of a long overnight journey to Heron Island. I popped a sleeping pill and tried my best to sleep on the most uncomfortable bus ever without a proper pillow. Let me just say, it was not a very successful sleep. We got to the harbor at about 8:00 in the morning and waited in the grass for 3 hours to catch the ferry. During this wait I slept better than I did the whole night before. At 11 it was time to board the ferry. They had warned us before that ferry could be rough and to take sea sickness medication if you get motion sickness. Nobody could have imagined how rough that trip was going ... read more

This blog was way too long when I first wrote it with the snorkeling details. I’ll talk about the general parts of the trip in this one then blog again with snorkel specifics! The Heron field trip was basically a destination vacation to a tropical island. We were there to study marine biology but for most of us it was about 1% school, 99% paradise. The school part of the trip was that everyone had to perform a research study of something on the reef. Some groups had to look at broken shells on the beach or sea cucumbers that looked like lifeless lumps but my group was assigned butterfly fish. We observed the diversity and behavior of butterfly fish in each reef habitat on the island. That’s scientific code for snorkeled on the reef all ... read more

I was so excited to spend the week on a tropical island in the Great Barrier Reef but had to face some brutal travel conditions to get there. Our group took a midnight bus up north to catch a ferry to the island. We got on the bus at 11:30 pm (10/2/12) and didn’t get off at the ferry stop until 8 am. Sleeping on the bus was pretty much impossible and it didn’t help that the driver stopped every couple hours for a bathroom break. We even stopped at 2:30 am for 45 mins to get food…still not sure why a bus of sleeping kids would need food at that hour?? When we got to the ferry stop, we had to sit around for 3 more hours and wait for the ferry that didn’t leave ... read more