My trip up the east coast of Australia ended in Cairns, where after a few days of lounging about in the resort pool, I bade farewell to the group that I had traveled with for two weeks. It's amazing how much fun you can have on a bus with people that you've only just met. Some highlights include... sneaking up on people while they're sleeping and taking pictures with us in the background... using the vibrate function on Rowan's phone to make people think that we were shaving their heads (and getting their reaction on video camera) ... quoting "Anchorman" and "Borat" for hours on end (it's boring, but it's my life). These are a few pictures of the resort pool:
My next two days were spent at the ProDive training center, where I learned all about how to be as fishlike as possible. Mornings were classroom time with lots of theory of diving and sciency stuff like that, but we got to get in the pool during the afternoon and practice skills. That was amusing, but the real fun started on the 3rd day, when the van picked me up at 6AM (yes, 6AM) to take us to the boat, which was to bring us out to the reef.
ProDive has almost exclusive rights to three areas of the reef, so their dive sites are much less trafficked than many of the other sites around the area. The weather was sunny, the seas were calm, the visibility was amazing. On one dive, you could literally see over 70 feet underwater (that's a long ways!). I saw all kinds of cool stuff, sea turtles as big as a dining room table, reef sharks (not the dangerous kind..."only" 4-6 feet long), true clownfish (more commonly known to the general public as "Nemo," and all sorts of other varieties of fish that would blow your mind.
Diving on the reef is great - you feel like you could be a bird, flying over some forest on another planet. You can control how you move vertically within the water just by controlling your breathing. And you can also follow animals around in a manner that just isn't available to snorkellers.
We also did a few night dives...kinda scary. Nighttime is when all the freaks and geeks of the reef come out. Sharks are more active, fish change color, lobsters come out of hiding, and the beady eyes of cleaner shrimp reflect your flashlight beam. There's something creepy about shining your flashlight on what looks like plain coral, and seeing hundreds of pairs of eyes staring back at you. My first night dive was with my open water class group, so the 8 of us went with an instructor. Between the great visibility in the water and the 9 flashlights, there was plenty of ambient light in the water, so it didn't really seem that dark. I think we scared everything away too... the only thing we saw was a big lobster.
But the next night, I hopped onto another boat (to stay an extra day - my boat was going back to Cairns), and so just went with two other people, one british guy and a crazy dutchman. The crazy dutchman REALLY wanted to see sharks, so he was the first one in the water. We slowly followed and made our way down to the anchor blocks and followed him off into the night. 3 flashlights in the water is a LOT fewer than 9, and all the wildlife that we had scared away the night before decided that it was time to come out and play. We saw 3 sharks that night, several turtles (one HUGE one that apparently is around 130 years old, and is named "Brian"), a pufferfish the size of a football, and got well lost and disoriented. But somehow the crazy dutchman pulled some wierd manouveres and got us out of the reef maze and back into the open water, landing us right back underneath the boat.
13 dives over 4 days found me back on land with an earache, and the constant feeling that I was about to fall over. Apparently, once you've been on a boat for a few days, trying to walk on land becomes very challenging... the feeling is especially intense in the shower. Hopefully the plane ride in a few hours will go smoothly! :0) My trip is starting to wind down... just a few days left in Sydney and Melbourne before I take off back to the States... just in time for summer!
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