5/11/10 - 5/14/10 (cairns)
Annie Lin
Cairns
We arrived in Cairns without much trouble except the airport security wouldn’t let Jon take some of his camera gear as part of his carry-on luggage. We had been very lucky that no one had given Jon a hard time about his camera bag. We didn’t want to mail the items to Cairns in case it didn’t get to us in time or pay the extra fee for checking in another luggage. Luckily Virgin Blue gave us an extra bag and checked it for free. Lucky for us!
Over the last four days we have been staying at a hostel/motel called Bellview right in the center of the city. There are a ton of motels, restaurants, and tourist information centers to accommodate the millions of tourists each year. The city doesn’t seem to sleep with night markets, clubs and McDonalds opening till 3am on weekdays. Cairns reminds us of the Fisherman’s Warf in San Francisco with all the shops selling packaged tours, even the camera shops. The streets are pretty clean since they want to make sure no rubbish goes into the ocean to damage the reef.
Our main reason for coming to Cairns was, of course, to visit the Great Barrier Reef, which is one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Can you name the other ones? Also, Jon wanted to do a helicopter ride to get an aerial video and Cairns was his last chance before we left Australia. We spent the entire day on Wednesday looking into our options. There are about a million places where you can book a tour and it can get quite confusing which one to pick. They are all slightly different yet relatively the same type of snorkeling tour. We found out that we could do a cruise/snorkel tour along with a helicopter ride back to the port. We decided to visit one of the companies that offer a cruise/flight tour to talk to them directly about what Jon wanted rather than through a booking agency. It’s a pretty slow tourist month for Cairns so the company offered us a deal. Even with the deal it is one of the most expensive things we have done so far but we figured it was one of those once in a lifetime opportunities. We booked the trip for Thursday and were excited to finally see the infamous Great Barrier Reef.
To capture our experience we searched around for an underwater video camera that we could rent. We found out there was a waterproof camera case that would fit my camera. We were a little uneasy taking my camera underwater but figured we would use the case again along our travel. The camera shop assured us that the case is safe to use and advised us to try it out in a swimming pool beforehand. We tested it when we got home by putting some tissue in the case and Jon took dunked it into the pool. It seemed to work perfectly fine but the real test would come when we took it out to the ocean.
I also read about a multimedia presentation on the Great Barrier Reef called Reef Teach. It came highly recommended since the tour only does a brief overview about the reef. We figured it would be a good idea to learn more before our snorkeling trip. The presentation lasted for about two hours and the presenter talked about the most common fishes and corals we would see on the reef. It was really informative and told us what to look for once we were out on the water. We also purchased some ginger pills, which are supposed to help with seasickness. I was a little afraid of going back out into the ocean since I had gotten really seasick on our return trip from swimming with the dolphins.
We have had a great time in Australia and we couldn’t have asked for a better way to end our Aussie adventure than with a cruise/helicopter ride of the Great Barrier Reef. We are making our way into southeast Asia with Bali as our first destination.
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