Hello all,
Hope everyone is well at home. Here's a summary of what went down on the Aussie trip we just recently took :)
First, Aussie is pretty warm - even in winter - and most of our vacation it was around 85 degrees or so. Lana was very happy after the long, wet and windy Wellington winter.
We flew in along the Aussie coast over top of the Great Barrier Reef for almost an hour. It was awesome to see it from that perspective - tracked down a couple arial pics of the reef to give some idea.
Once we arrived in Cairns, we did a live-a-board dive on the Great Barrier Reef where we were shipped out to a pretty big boat anchored beside the reef (the outer part of the reef is about 2hrs off the coast of Aussie near Cairns). So we had almost two full days and a night on the Great Barrier Reef. Really cool. We did 6 dives on the reef, including a night dive. The reef is everything you read about and more; just an explosion of color and all sorts of marine life swarming everywhere. We saw reef sharks, sea turtles, groupers as big as a man, giant clams big enough to sit inside, barracuda and perhaps the highlight of my dives, we heard the calls of migrating humpback whales - although we didn't see any of the big suckers :) A couple of the pics of the surface of the reef when the tide went out are ours, but our underwater camera didn't do so well so the other pics are borrowed from the internet just to give you an idea of what it looked like. Wish we had a video of the dives - nothing else would do them justice. Safe to say that was right up there with the most incredible experience of anyone's life.
After Cairns and the scuba diving, we drove north into the Daintree Rainforest. The rainforest is the oldest continually surviving rainforest on the planet (some 100 million yrs) and extends down from the mountains right to the white sand beaches on the coast. The arial pic of the coast is Daintree. All sorts of cool animals inhabit the rainforest, including the Cassowary which is a relative of the ostrich (i.e. big flightless bird), but has some red and blue coloring and a crazy mohawk-looking bone on top of its head. They grow up to around 6 feet and can be very aggressive (wielding a dagger-like spur on each foot, they will run at you and jump in the air and kick out w/ both feet); we saw one in the wild but it didn't run at us :) Also in the rainforest is that which Aussie might be best known for - the crocodile. The one in the pic we saw on a boat ride down a river - it was 15 feet long - a big sucker but we saw one about 15-16 feet in Hartley's Crocodile Adventures close up and personal. They took us out in a boat and did the whole putting half chickens on bamboo poles and hanging them over the water while the crocs jumped up to grab dinner - and they can get their whole body vertically out of the water except for the tail, so they were easily reaching up to 8 feet out of the water. Aussie still has several human casualties each year from people being snatched out of boats or off river banks . . . Needless to say, we never felt very comfortable swimming in the ocean because the crocs are known to travel up the coast from river to river.
Some other highlights were the beautiful mangroves along the coast of the rainforest. We learned that part of how mangroves have adapted to survive in salt water areas is they transfer all the salt from the water they use into one particular leaf which turns yellow and eventually dies and drops while another takes its place - think they called it the sacrificial leaf. So all the mangroves had a couple yellow leaves mixed in amidst all the greenery. Palm and coconut trees are everywhere on the coast. Really is a paradise that far north on the Aussie coast. Although summers are supposed to be hot, hot, hot. And wet in the rainforest.
And we ended the adventures with about 3 days relaxing on the beautiful beaches of Port Douglas. Not much to tell about the time there, except for good weather and good food. Probably Lana's favorite part of the vacation :)
The weather is warming with spring over here so more pics will be coming soon since we'll be out and about more.
Take care everyone!
