I Know The Guy Who Owns This Place

After something like 30 hours of travel we made it from Seattle to Vancouver to Sydney and then to Cairns, Queensland along the northern coast of Australia. It’s been averaging highs around 91 and lows around 77 since we arrived and very humid.

Jet lag hasn’t been too bad although the first day I was pretty backwards on which way was up. We’ve adjusted for the most part but still keep going to bed too early each night.

We spent our first day driving out in the Queensland countryside to do a hike through a rainforest. Pictures are at
http://picasaweb.google.com/selner/CairnsAustraliaDaintreeNationalForest.

Today we went out to the Great Barrier Reef (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrier_Reef) which was our main reason for coming to Cairns. It turns out that the outer reef where you typically snorkel and dive is about 40 miles offshore. I had no idea it was that far. A boat ride would have been 2+ hours each way just to get there and back, so of course, we opted for a slightly faster way to get there. (You’ll see what I mean in the pictures.)

Unfortunately, I didn’t have an underwater camera so I didn’t get pictures of the 80 yr old giant clam, Wally the Napoleon fish (the size of half of Troy(!) but friendly), or the 15 year old sea turtle I got to snorkel with. The school upon school of fish (from angel fish looking guys to zebra striped to little sardine-like ones.) Can you tell I thought it was pretty cool? I think next time I’ll have to get scuba certified so I can really check it all out and bring a camera underwater with me.

Here are the pictures from today: http://picasaweb.google.com/selner/CairnsAustraliaGreatBarrierReef. Unfortunately, since the fish and coral pictures are through the observation room glass, the colors don’t pop as much as they do in person. Still though, I hope you get the point. The reef was definitely worth the trip up to Cairns; blew the socks off the snorkeling we did in Puerto Vallarta a couple years ago.

We’re off to Melbourne in the morning where it’ll hopefully be a bit cooler (highs around 80 there; it’s much further south.)

~ by bryan on December 20, 2007.