Thursday 11 April 2013

Travel Blog: Australia

30/3/13 - The Great Barrier Reef!!

So today we set out on a boat from Cairns, to see one of the natural wonders of the world, The Great Barrier Reef.  And not only were we going to snorkel, we were going to try scuba diving for the first time.  I'm not going to lie I was pretty scared! But there were lots of people doing their first intro dive, and we were going down only 2 people to 1 instructor so it seemed quite safe.

Last night we watched 'Finding Nemo' to get even more excited, so we would have been very disappointed if we didn't find a nemo fish!  Luckily we found quite a few, and they are so tiny.  They also never ever leave that anemone plant!  

The diving experience really was amazing.  It was quite hard to get the hang of breathing underwater, and it is so loud when you breathe out and all the bubbles appear from your face.  But as soon as I'd mastered it, I never wanted to come back up to the surface. It is like entering another world; the whole ocean and its family are suddenly there to play with.  The visibility is great, you can see deep and beyond, and the creatures we seen we could never begin to count.  Apart from millions of types of fish, of all colours imaginable, and lots of different types of multicoloured coral, we also saw an octopus and a turtle! He was just chilling on the floor.  Some people even saw reef sharks too.  Most places on the reef are actually quite shallow too, I imagined the reef life to begin quite deep but it's not the case at all.  When diving we only went around 6-7 metres deep, and we could have touched the coral and seabed if we wanted.  Huge fish and sharks are often in the shallow water just below the surface, and you can see lots of marine life from the boat.  At one point, we could even stand up on the sand in the middle of the ocean.[See 2nd photograph below] We must have spent hours snorkelling and investigating the underwater kingdom, and it just wasn't long enough.  There literally is so much to see on the Great Barrier Reef. It is so huge, that there are lots of different boats that go to lots of different reefs and cays daily.  If I had the money, I'd do them all!




In fact, I think I have got the diving bug.  I am really regretting not doing a PADI dive course in Koh Tao when I was there, as it's probably the cheapest in the world.

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