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Published: November 11th 2007
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Makerel Bay
Swimming through beautiful caves in the reef at Makerel bay in the Whitsundays
- November 1 - 2 - Airlie Beach
- November 3 - 5 - Sailing aboard 'Powerplay' in the Whitsundays
Check out this cool video I uploaded from one of our dives in the caves - having a little fun with a sting ray. No, didn't want to end up like Steve Erwin, but you have to really mess with them for them to be aggressive!
Queensland is full of these fun diving and sailing trips out to the reef or the beautiful Whitsunday island. I did take a really amazing boat trip in the Whitsundays. Highlights like this trip and the diving trip out of Cairns sort of make up for the backpackers experience in between...
I took the Oz Experience bus down from Townsville to Airlie Beach, again kicking myself for having been ripped off so badly. We arrived in Airlie Beach and I had a day and a half to wait before the boat trip that I had booked. I did my best to entertain myself in Airlie Beach - there's really not too much going on in this town aside from Aussie and English tourists drinking themselves into a stupor at the
gigantic outdoor backpacker bars along the main street in the town. I stayed at a place called Magnums and my patience was already starting to wear thin from staying at these backpacker places down the coast. Ok, it's part of the experience, but I think I prefer the Asian style travel. I suppose a big part of it is how much more expensive it was compared to Asia - and the enjoyment one gets from it is not really proportional. But I'm still glad I got to experience it - I had finally made it up to Queensland and had gotten to see a lot of cool things and do some diving. Airlie Beach was on of those down times however, and I guess I was in a little funk over those couple days. So I ended up changing my plan - after the boat trip in the Whitsundays I was going to cut the east coast trip short.
No, Airlie wasn't so bad. Actually, I ended up meeting a couple local guys and went with them to do some lawn bowling - apparently, it's an old person's game, but there were a lot of young locals playing. It
was fun, and I even won their little raffle prize of free beer. The next day I was heading out to the Whitsundays.
I was really excited to leave on the boat trip. I went on a 2 night trip on the boat Powerplay - they really showed us a great time. There were only 18 passengers on the boat - everyone was a lot of fun. There were a lot of Germans on the trip - one divemaster who had moved to the Sunshine coast and sounded completely Aussie, it was kinda funny. A few of her friends were visiting from Germany. I met 2 fun guys from England, Tim and Dave, who are traveling for a year and a fun couple from California, Andy and Lorraine. The divemaster Ezza was a hilarious Aussie who showed us lots of cool stuff under water. The visability in the Whitsundays was not as good as I expected - certainly not as good as further up north on the Great Barrier reef, but it was still good to see. I'm glad I got to do a lot of diving in Australia, but overall the diving in Asia, especially Malaysia, was much
better and a much better value. But Australia is great at marketing their tourism.
The people on Powerplay were very good about taking lots of pictures and videos, above and under water, and each night entertained us with a slide show of the day's activities. It was also nice that it was BYO, so we could kick back and enjoy a few beers at the end of the day. And we couldn't have asked for better weather - it was sunny and warm and the sea was pretty calm. One morning we went to one of the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen - Whitehaven beach on Whitsunday island. The sun was strong, even so early in the morning. It was a lot of fun, but they wanted everyone to wear stinger suits if we were going in the water. They have these deadly jelly fish here... or maybe they're just über-cautious with their strict safety standards.
The only downside of Powerplay was what they referred to as the 'toilet symphony' in the mornings. The two toilets on board were incredibly noisy - as they explained they had some kind of blender type contraption in the plumbing which
is apparently typical on smaller liveaboard boats. On the first morning, the first person woke up at around 4:30 - before sunrise - and ended up setting off a chain of events, waking up everyone on the entire boat. I was also sleeping in the main room inside - so there was no sleeping in. But it really didn't matter. When you get up early in the morning you have the chance to see the seaturtles coming up to the surface for their first breath of the morning. They are so cute, and there were a lot of them around. We also saw a few schools of dolphins, jumping out of the water.
One day we did go to this incredible dive site where there were all these underwater corridors and caves to swim through. I had never been diving in anything like this so it was a lot of fun swimming through these structures. It's just beautiful how the light hits these formations in the reef!
On the last day we headed back to Airlie beach. I wish I could've stayed out a lot longer.
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