Australian Reef Rewind

I will let everyone know at the start that our flight from Cairns to Sydney went very smooth and we have no major issues to report on that front. The only interesting thing of note was that we were cryo-genically frozen for our flight so it wouldn’t seem to take as long.

Here is a picture of them filling the cabin with liquid nitrogen.

Okay, maybe that didn’t happen, but it makes for a cool story. The cabin was seriously cloudy from the water vapourizer humidifier, which is what you see in the picture.

Anyway, for this post I wanted to back up a few days and put in my two cents on our trip out to the Great Barrier Reef.

Unfortunately, we no longer had access to an underwater camera, so we weren’t able to take pictures during our snorkle tour, but I do have a few shots that we took with our phones.

The reef tour we were part of had many options and add-ons. The basic fee gets you on the boat, morning tea, lunch and access to the glass bottom boat and semi-submersible tours. Everything else was an add-on.

Basic, never-snorkled-before, was $35 per adult. This is where they outfit you with fins, mask, snorkel, lycra body suit, life jacket and pool noodles too if you need them. They keep you in a roped off area and obviously there is no actual diving due to the life jacket.

The more advanced snorkeling tour was $45 per person, and with that they provide the same gear, minus the pool noodles, and take you a ways out from the main platform on a small boat and drop you in the middle of the reef. This was the option that Kat and I took, but we used our own gear, and no life jackets. What’s the point in having all of that gear if I can’t actually dive down. The boat crew had no issues with us using our own gear and not using a life jacket, so all was good.

I mentioned they had a lot of options and here are some more: scuba diving for beginners, scuba for certified divers, snuba, helmet dive, seabob rentals and helicopter rides. Snuba is where you are breathing from a regulator, but you have no tank or BC, just a mask and you walk on the bottom. This does mean you are tethered to the boat and limited to where you can go.

A seabob is one of the fancy water propulsion devices that you hang on to and it does the swimming for you. We didn’t look into any of the other options but I am sure they didn’t come cheep. They had some professional photographers there who took your picture as you were getting on board. They would also be hanging out in the beginner snorkeling area taking underwater photos. They were charging $15 for the first photo and $20 for any underwater ones. That was a bit exorbitant.

Oh, they also had underwater cameras you could rent, and then buy an SD card for. The rental fee was $60. Our fellow earthshipper, Katrina, bought her underwater camera for $60, so I wasn’t going to spend that just to rent one.

Anyway, we didn’t get to our snorkeling tour until the afternoon, so we did the other free stuff in the morning. Here we get to a few pictures too.

As you can see from that first photo, the sky is very blue and the water is very calm. This was the day after the big lunar event (full moon, super moon, total eclipse and blue moon). The crew said we were really lucky because it is rarely that calm, nor the tide as high.

Here is Kat looking like she’s freezing. Don’t fall for it, it was blazing hot, especially if you happened to step out in the direct sun.

This is a general crowd shot to give you a small idea of how many people came on the boat.

That wasn’t anywhere near everyone either. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had upwards of 200 people on that tour, and two thirds of them were Asian. They had crew members on board who were also translators. Pick your language of choice: Dutch, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and I think there was one more but I don’t remember what it was right now.

We started with the semi-submersible tour, which is a boat with a deep draft that you crawl into the bottom of and look out portholes under the surface.

My first decent picture was of this moon jellyfish. There were tonnes of these guys around. Fortunately, they’re mostly harmless.

There was one species of fish that was sizeable, abundant and really curious so not too difficult to take a picture of.

The water wasn’t as clear as I thought it would be. That may also be due to the heavy tidal action, but it meant you couldn’t see very far in the water. The camera saw even less.

Hopefully you can at least see a bunch of fishy blobs on the left side of the next photo. There were a number of different groups coming together.

Here is one last one, of the curious fish again.

After the semi-submersible, we did the glass bottom boat tour as well. It was much the same, but less confined. We did get to check out a few of the shallower spots, so the coral was much closer.

I think if we had just come straight to Australia and done this tour, it would have had a much larger impact. However, we just spent most of the month of January snorkeling in Indonesia. Much of the coral is the same.

However, our snorkeling tour had one major thing we didn’t have in Indonesia: a marine biologist as our guide.

This was really great because we could ask about anything we saw that she hadn’t already mentioned. Remember this guy from one of my Indonesian posts?

We found a small one during our tour and I dove down to point it out. The tour guide then filled us in.

It is a mushroom coral. The fascinating thing about them is that they don’t attach themselves to a rock or other structure like all other coral. They a free floating, just sitting on the bottom. This does mean though that forces of nature can flip them over pretty easily, which makes them more vulnerable to abuse.

I only saw two of those during our reef tour, but they were extremely abundant on Kenawa island, in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

We ran into huge pods of those moon jellyfish, but thankfully they aren’t harmful. No, it’s the ones you can’t see that will sting you. The tide was going out by this point and the wave action was picking up. There was a small debris field we swam into and that’s when you will run into stinging jellyfish. The debris doesn’t seem to need to be specific, but when I encountered them, it was usually things like floating leaves and other organic matter.

Anyway, our tour guide managed to get one wrapped around her hand, I had one zap the back of my left hand and my neck and Kat had a sting on one of her hands. It was mostly like a bee sting, these weren’t boxed jellyfish or manowars. After that happened I pulled my sleeves down over my hands to protect them. Yes we were all wearing wet suits as protection.

We saw lots of coral, and lots of fish and just before we got back to the main platform we saw two sea turtles feeding at the bottom. It may have not had quite the impact I was expecting, but the snorkeling tour was definitely worth it. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend it.

Australian Safari

This morning, Kat and I were picked up at the very late hour of 07:10. The tour bus seated 15, plus the driver and all seats were filled. There were a number of us Canadians, some Americans, British and Swiss.

Today was our safari tour of a rain forest up here on the northeast side of the continent. There was a lot of driving, not only to pick up everyone. The drive up to the rain forest probably took close to two hours.

The safari started with a boat cruze down a river in the hopes that we might see a crocodile.

Crocs, as they call them here, don’t like clear water because they can’t hide and surprise their prey. This is why the river is so muddy. The muddiness actually comes from the tides going in and out, as this river is connected to the ocean. When the tide is in, the water is salty. When the tide is going out, it’s fresh water.

If you look closely at this next picture you can see a small bird in a nest on the dead tree. I believe they said it was a type of kingfisher.

Here we have a funky red plant that I don’t remember the name of.

This next one is of an actual crocodile.

No, really. The tour guide even brought the boat in closer so we could all see it. I couldn’t see anything except brown water and trees. There were a few others that were spotted as well, but it was either on the opposite side of the boat or it disappeared before it came into my view. I am sorry to say, we don’t have any pictures of actual crocs.

We do have a lot of pictures of the massive ammounts of greenery growing along the side of the water.

Many of the trees are well over 30m (100′).

It was a gorgeous, sunny day so almost any picture will look good.

After the boat cruze, we had a walk through the forest. You might think this to be dangerous, it being Australia and all, but the path was a boardwalk with waist high railings, so unless you decide to wander from the path, you’d be pretty safe. The only real danger were the mosquitoes. They really liked legs, and any time we stopped I spent a considerable amount of my attention on removing them. There was one girl who had so many bites on the back of her legs, she had a welt the size of a grapefruit.

We did get to see some interesting creatures, but many of them were not out in the wild.

This one was, though.

Sorry about the bad focus. This is a medium sized golden orb weaver. We saw another one later on that was bigger but I couldn’t get a picture of it as we were in the bus. Yes, we saw a spider that was big enough that you could spot it from 4-5m away (13-16′).

A snake in a terrarium. I don’t know what kind.

Another snake. This one might have been the death adder, but without seing his head, it’s hard to tell.

A small aquatic turtle.

A really big crayfish.

More snake.

Here we have a big lizard hanging out on a log in a cage.

These are Galah birds.

These bright little guys were being quite noisy.

This guy was just hanging out on the back of a chair, and he wasn’t camera shy either.

There were also two sharing a cage, though the door was open, so they were able to come and go as they like.

Okay, last birdie.

They had a bunch of displays at the visitor’s center showing some of the insects.

A lot of them were butterflies or moths.

This guy was just sitting on the hand railing during our walk through the forest.

I’m sure you would all like to see something cute after all that, so here are the wallabies.

These wallabies are all orphans and can’t be returned to the wild. We were given pieces of sweet potato and we got to feed the wallabies.

I’ll give you one guess as to whether this next wallaby is male or female.

Here is the female with a full pouch.

There was a lot more that happened, but unfortunately I am going to have to cut this short, as it’s getting late and it has been a long day.

I will leave you with this awesome picture from one of the lookouts that we visited today.

Earthship Island, Day 21

Two days ago we came upon this guy. He was much larger than most of the other hermit crabs we have come across.

He looked quite oversized for his shell so we tried offering him a bigger one.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t going for it. I don’t think he liked being handled so much and just wanted to get away. We left him be, but he still didn’t take either of the shell options we offered.

The mornings here are usually pretty nice. The wind is calm and the tide is out. Sometimes the sun shows up too.

Yesterday afternoon the clouds rolled in and we were pretty sure it was going to rain on us. Here is what it looked like looking out from the Earthship.

It wasn’t long after I took those photos that the sky opened up and the rain came down.

It was fascinating to watch as the rain smooths out all of the waves coming to shore.

This rain was driven by strong winds from the south, so the back of the Earthship fills with water.

I had put a towel over the door to try to reduce the wind and rain coming in. It did cut down on the wind, but didn’t do much for stopping the rain.

Out front, we saw this guy out in his boat in the rain storm.

He didn’t seem overly concerned. He did pull into shore in front of the Earthship to bail out his boat and the headed back out, sticking to the shoreline.

I was watching all of this and thought to myself, “how many opportunities will you have in your life to go out and experience a tropical rain storm?” So I ran out into the rain and had a good frolicking.

I have to say that compared to the rain water, the ocean water felt like bathtub warm. I yelled out to Kat, who took the picture, “This is the coldest I’ve been since we arrived!” The rain was chilly, but not unbearable.

I can mark that down on my list of exciting life experiences.