The second city of Queensland is Cairns, and it is to be found a long way away from everywhere else! The distance between Cairns and Brisbane is about twice the distance between Melbourne and Brisbane… that makes for a very long bus ride unless you're arriving from somewhere in between.
Cairns has a great tropical climate that induces an easygoing attitude in the locals and people passing through - you just want to relax under the coconut palms and look at the azure ocean, or sip a beer in one of the many bars that cater for thirsty travelers.
Having just two full days in Cairns meant we were on a very tight schedule and had to make an important decision before we got there - either dive on the Great Barrier Reef, or visit the rain forests of Cape Tribulation in the north. It wasn't easy to say no to visiting the Cape, but diving on the Great Barrier Reef is one of those things that you must do if you've got the opportunity, so the choice was obvious.
The outfit that we selected to take us out on the reef was Cairns Diving Centre, a small, independently run company that does great value for money day trips and longer live-aboard courses. On our trip there was one other person doing a trial dive, a handful of people getting their certification and a couple of snorkelers, with a head count of 19 in all with 7 staff - not bad when you consider how little we paid to b
e on the boat. The trial-dive master, Ethan, did a great job of introducing us to the basics of diving (we've already been on a trial dive in Malta, but its always nice to refresh your memory) and explaining what would be happening on the dive. The 90 minute ride out to the reef was a little choppy, but then again I didn't expect any less as we were traveling through very open water.
Once at our first dive site we were kitted up and hopped into the water with Ethan. The first order of business was to practice removing the regulator from our mouth and putting it back in, followed by removing water from our masks. Once we had proved our mettle with these simple tasks we could begin our descent. I was immediately impressed with the clarity of the water - we could see a good ten or twelve meters ahead, a very welcome change from our experience in the Whitsundays!
Once upon the actual reef we were met with a thunderstorm of rainbows - multicolored fish swimming here and there, colored coral, big fish, little fish, and all of them pretty oblivious to our presence! About half way into our dive we hit a double jackpot - we came across a family of clownfish living in an anemone - we had found Nemo! Immediately after spotting Nemo a white tipped reef shark swam by us and settled onto the bottom. The dive instructor directed us over the shark and it just stayed there with us hovering a couple of meters above it, before setting off to chase a large parrot fish. Ethan later told us that it was the first time he had seen a shark chasing a fish on the reef, usually they just sit in the sand waiting. Time underwater really flies by, and it felt like we had only just jumped in when we resurfaced after half an hour under the sea. Unfortunately Australian law dictates that on your first trial dive you cannot hold anything in your hands as you must link arms with your fellow divers, so there are no photos from our first deep sea adventure.
Back on board we were treated to a light lunch while the skipper took the vessel to our second site for the day, this time to a much shallower reef where we would be snorkeling. The reef was so shallow that it was hardly 6 inches below the surface in some places, and I've got a scratch on my knee to prove it! Swimming on the surface was definitely rougher than being down under the surface, but I thought that we saw a lot more from the surface than we did deep down - most of the coral life on the reef depends on daylight to survive, so the deeper you go the less there is to see. I thought that the amount of sea life we had seen during our dive could not be topped, but I was proved wrong! Clouds of small (3cm-6cm) fish could be seen hovering round the edges of the reef, schools of larger fish swimming a few meters below the surface, and plenty of monster sized fish darting among the coral. The palette of colours was reminiscent of an acid trip - fish that are half purple, half green, orange and red, blue and yellow, black and gold…
As you can tell I had a great time snorkeling and diving on the Great Barrier Reef, and I would say that it is a quintessential element of a trip to Australia!
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