So following our impressive trip to Magnetic Island we boarded our greyhound bus and headed north one more time up to Cairns. Cairns is the mecca for great barrier reef trips and we arrived to a small town with one focus… get to the reef. Thankfully we had booked ourselves at the YHA Cairns and the place was significantly more magnificent than Maggie Island. This was our first YHA experience and we couldn't have been more thrilled. Clean rooms, a pool w/ COLD bubbling tub (genius), movie/game room, HUGE kitchen and the most important thing…. A/C! Again it was funny to see how the windows have no screens (even though there are billions of bugs in Oz) and that the windows were split. I don't really know how to describe this but they were tiered so you could open them, individual five inch high by twenty inch wide panes that opened and closed like a shutter. So thus it wasn't air tight but we ran that A/C like there was no tomorrow.
We were greeted at the Cairns bus station by Dawn and Chris who were eager to show us what they had leaned about the town. They were really nice and took into account the budget that Paul and I are on to bring us to the "night market." This market was pretty cheap and filled with asian food. Paul wasn't having it as it was friend and buffet style. (this became a running joke for the four of us that Paul can't live down). So we headed to the liquor store to pick up our customary case of beer for the night. We ended up at a backpacker friendly restaurant with good cheap food deals. Again our waiter was from the UK.
The next morning we headed out at 7am for our reef dive. Paul and I did one guided scuba trip and then snorkeled for the rest of the day. The boat included lunch, coffee and snacks but the dives were extra. On our Whitsundays trip one of the instructors jokingly said that the downfall of a vacation budget is begin scuba certified and I think he's right. You really want to go diving but it ends up adding up really quickly! Never the less diving the great barrier reef was one of my "must-do's" for the trip so I plopped down my visa and we were underwater.
The wildlife was really beautiful up near Cairns. Not that the whitsundays weren't impressive, they were but we saw so much more up in Ciarns. Sea turtles, sting rays, nemo's, sharks, hundreds of fish, a HUGE lobster, shrimp… the list goes on and on! Probably the most memorable experiences from this reef trip both come from when we were snorkeling in the afternoon. Paul and I joined a guided snorkel group and we ran into the largest and ugliest fish I've ever seen. A huge school of Buffalo Reef Trout (not exactly sure on the name but the Buffalo is definitely correct). Anyway these fish must have each weighed more than 200 lbs. They were almost as long as me and there must have been thirty of them together. Their heads are flat and look like a buffalo. The bigger the fish the more interested I was in the water. I'm not sure why but it was so impressive to see these beasts, we swam after them for a while and when the group of snorkelers closed in from most angles they fled under me! I must have been a foot from one of them!
The second memorable moment was when Paul and I broke off from the group and headed for a sandbar to chill for a while. On our way there we kept running into pockets of sting rays. I was leading b/c Paul had some blisters on his feet and was swimming without fins. I came upon a bull sting ray. IT. WAS. HUGE. I only had a moment to look at it before it rose from the sand and started to swim away. I popped my head above wanter and yelled to Paul to come over and check it out but before he got there the ray was gone. It must have been 5-7 feet wide and all it took was two flaps of its wings before it was gone. These Bull Sting Rays are pretty well known now because they're the ones that killed Steve Irwin. They're actually really harmless unless they feel trapped in and as the have heard time and time again that is what happened with Mr. Irwin. Everyone talks about that story here. I guess when they were filming the camera man and Steve were coming at the ray from opposite directions. Steve from behind the ray and as the ray was about to turn to swim away he spotted Steve. He put his barb up and stuck steve in the heart. Apparently (correct me if I'm wrong) Steve could have lived if he didn't pull the barb out of his heart. Moral of the story is if I get stuck in the heart by a bull ray I'll leave the barb in. No, actually the moral of the story is that this is a wild planet we're exploring and we need to be cautious but respect the wildlife we're observing.
I'm off my soapbox now.
So we were lucky b/c (not for them) Dawn and Chris' boat got cancelled due to not enough people booking on it so they booked onto ours. It was a great day as a group of four. That night we headed back to the package store to pick up yet another case of beer and hit the hot 'cold' tub. The four of us must have been in that tub for over five hours together drinking and talking. Chris and I had some great conversations about history that have been in my head ever since. He told me that Stalin didn't even tell his top commanders of the russian army that Hitler was dead. Or even that they had his body. It was amazing hearing about the end of WWII as Chris had just finished a book about the rush to Berlin at the close of the EU theater.
You can really make good friends quickly on a trip like this. You don't have anything keeping you from continuing to develop your friendship. There are no other strings pulling on your time so you just order another couple beers and keep chatting. This is how I feel about Dawn & Chris. We were lucky to have met them. I'd go ahead and assume we filled a need for each other pretty well. They had been traveling as a couple for three weeks when they met us and Paul and I had been together for three weeks as well. It was nice to have other people to converse with and get to know. I think Paul and I would both agree the week we spent with them was the best of the trip thus far.
The following morning we woke up a bit early to get breakfast with them one more time before they headed to the airport. It was bitter sweet as we said goodbye. Paul and I will meet back up with them in England when we get to Europe in July. We'll get to see their homes and hopefully be able to travel to Ireland with them as well. Paul and I have also opened up our homes to them when we get back to the states so hopefully they'll take us up on a trip to the US in 2012.
Onto to NZ…
No comments:
Post a Comment