Our five weeks in Australia ended and we're now in New Zealand, the last time we 'spoke' we were in Airley Beach and about to go out on a sailing trip around the Whitsunday Islands.......
Airley is a proper backpacker place with lots of hostels, bars and places selling tours. The main area is pretty much a single street, some might call it tacky but it was lively and we enjoyed it (despite the rain). Our time there also coincided with 'Schoolies Week' which is a bit like the Australian version of spring break. This meant there were shed loads of 17-18 yr olds descending on the place to basically go mental! Apparently schoolies week is mainly centred on the gold coast so we got off pretty lightly. We saw them all arrive and then lucky for us left for the Whitsundays. Although before our departure I decided the 'mo' had to go!! Was starting to look like a cross between 'magnum' (as Jen pointed out!) and someone in zee German army..
Our boat for the sailing trip was a catamaran and we shared it with six other passengers and two crew. All of the other passengers were German, an older couple and four 20-something friends, but we managed to avoid any Fawlty Towers moments! The weather wasn't brilliant so we didn't get to see the islands as you see them in the pictures but it was still a great trip. We snorkeled over the reef and saw some awesone fish, it was stinger season (Stingers are deadly jellyfish - nice! The whole Queensland coast is affected at this time of year) so we were wearing wetsuits but no-one was stung. I was going to do my first scuba dive but the visibility wasn't great because of the weather (both the lack of sun and the run-off water from the islands) and it wasn't cheap so i stuck to the snorkelling.
After the sailing trip we left Airley and headed up towards Cairns. We stopped in Port Douglas for a couple of nights which is just north of Cairns and spent a day driving around the tablelands visiting waterfalls.
In Cairns we booked onto a boat out to the great barrier reef, the trip we booked took us out to a set of reefs called 'Agincourt' which are right out on the edge of the reef next to the continental shelf and supposedly one of the best areas to go to. The weather was forecast to be pretty average (again!) but we lucked in with a blue sky day and hardly any wind which meant the boat could go to the best dive spots on the outside of the reef. I decided to do my intro dive at the first spot, we went down to about 11m and looked down over the first drop of the continental shelf which went down about another 50m. The water was super clear compared to the Whitsundays, and the reef itself far more interesting, also we only needed to wear lycra stinger suits rather than wetsuits which was a bonus. On the way back up i bumped into 'Wally' the resident giant Maori wrasse fish which is about 3ft long with a massive head and huge lips, a right looker!
At the other two dive spots we snorkeled and saw loads more fish, a turtle and a small reef shark. One of the guys from the boat came out and gave a snorkel safari, he'd basically see stuff we couldn't notice like a sea cucumber and then free dive down about 30ft to the bottom and grab it for us to look at.
Back in Cairns we checked out the night life and had a few beers in a local micro brewery. That's when we noticed the bats, Cairns has a resident population of giant fruit bats that live in the trees in the town centre, their wingspan must be about 3 feet. We left the following morning and flew back down to Sydney - you get a great view of the reef when you fly out of Cairns airport. We were in Sydney for one night, had drinks and food with Christel and Adam in Kings Cross which is where we were staying and then left the next day for New Zealand.. A bit of a shock from the 33 degrees we left in Cairns, to 16 degrees in Christchurch.....brass monkeys!
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