Cairns and The Great Barrier Reef

The final destination on the Australian tour was tropical Cairns. We staying at Gilligan’s which is the biggest hostel around and gives free daily meals and free gym! (I kind of miss exercise). We reunited with Clara and Tina and met Rich, Chrissi and many others and together had many some pretty big nights drinking good ol’goon on the balconies and stairwells. At daybreak we soaked up the sunshine on the edge of a man-made lagoon (they have these all over the place in the tropics to keep you out the sea). Every evening a rippling screeching cloud of fruit bats would swarm overhead and almost blotch out the twilight sky. We took a bus out of town to a stretch of beach and staying within the netted area went for a swim, for me Cairns was a place to relax during the day and let off steam at night.

Off course my favorite thing about Cairns was our trip to The Great Barrier Reef. Within 20 minutes of sailing we’d found an ideal site. The skies were bruised and threatened a downpour, undeterred we suited up; fins, mask, weight belt, BCD, regulator, octopus, air tank with over 180psi, final checks done, high five and took the plunge. Immediately you saw that abundance of biodiversity but the vivid colours I had imagined seemed muted and dull, perhaps due to the weather and poor visibility however this did little to spoil the experience and I honestly don’t think that diving will ever get old for me. By now I had learnt not to eagerly chase after the first big fish I saw, rather to take it easy and appreciate the smaller things because they are often missed but the most interesting. I focused on the nursery fish with completely transparent bodies and the clown fish family (nemo) as they rolled around within anemies that they have immunity but remain deadly to others, I followed a trigger fish that will change sex once the big territorial female dies or moves on. Cruising along in a trance before I knew it I had come face to face with a turtle resting on the reef, the surprise made me inhaled deeply and involuntarily rise towards the surface, eventually I managing to compose my excitement and my breathing. I rested beside the reptile for a good five or ten minutes watching her gently sway with the tide, her beak slowly open and close and her big yellowish eyes follow my shape. Little did I know that sharks had been spotted close to the boat but now too far away from us to find. We followed the seabed under the lip of the reef giving away stingray’s hiding places and rose alongside a aquatic canyon finally surfacing beneath the underbelly of our catamaran that large angel fish where also using for shelter.

The cool thing about the barrier reef is that many areas are shallow enough that you can free dive to the bottom and watch the fish for as long as you can hold your breath. I spotted a few more turtles (I know pretty lucky) and stayed with them as they swam down. I went on the search for sharks but to no avail and took in as much as I could. Before the trip was out we visited a sandy island protected by surrounding reef, on the island all you could see was shades of blue varying in depth and dark clouds closing in, by the time we got back aboard we had a torrential downpour, Whilst a million shards of rain drenched everything (including me) I sat out on the main deck drinking tea, eating cheese and cashews and thinking to myself how amazing this all was. Cairns did have one parting gift for us on our flight out; while we flew up into the clear sky the scale of the reef slowly became apparent. Something that you really cannot comprehend from a boat, on that day as we left it looked so fragile and almost otherworldly.