Great Barrier Reef

Last weekend D and I headed to Port Douglas for some quality R&R. We flew into Cairns, 3.5 hours from Melbourne and then drove an hour to Port Douglas. Why go to so much trouble for just a weekend? The Great Barrier Reef! (And I took the Monday off as a vacation day!) We stayed at the Sheraton which was a bit dated but very nice - they have seven or eight lagoons all around the grounds which I enjoyed all day Monday. I was so busy enjoying it I didn't really get any pictures of the hotel!

D found a really great boat that went out to the reef for the day on Saturday. There are different areas of the reef - we went to Opal Reef. The boat was fantastic because the top floor was a sun deck with amazing lounge chairs you could enjoy for the 1.5 hour ride out and back. Here's a snap of me on the way out. I had to hold on tightly to the rail to avoid toppling over; the waves were deceptively large!

Once we got out to the reef we stopped at three different spots to snorkel (or dive, but scuba diving remains one of the only adventurous things I won't do!) and they were all beautiful. There were lots of neat fish, but I was most impressed by the coral. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Unfortunately the colour gets absorbed by the water so it doesn't look as bright as it actually is, and it is even duller through the camera. Imagine all the coral is bright, and colours of the rainbow! The best way to experience the reef (other than actually being there) is by video, so check out my 7 minute tour here!

What kind of a fish is this???

This picture below is of a white tipped reef shark. Let me tell you a story about this sighting. First of all, they told us on the boat that there are reef sharks and that they are harmless and actually smaller than they look (the masks make things look 20% bigger)...and if you see one you're really lucky. So, I'm snorkeling all by myself (D was diving) which was making me a bit nervous to begin with, and then I see this shark, and I'm actually not scared of it, but trying to chase after it to get this great photo (success!). However, this smaller pointy fish starts swimming into me. At first I don't know what it is, and am checking if it's my bathing suit tie or camera strap or something....but no, it's definitely a fish. I know it's not going to really hurt me, but it keeps startling me. So I start to swim away quickly, hoping to lose it. Here's a tip: don't try to race a fish in water. You're not likely to win. Anyways it keeps following me and bumping into me. One of the guides who is out in the water is nearby so I make it over to him and he's laughing at me. He saw the whole thing and I'm sure could hear me shrieking underwater each time I got nudged. He said that little fish follow sharks around so they can get their leftovers....and when I was right above the shark the fish got confused and thought I was the shark!!! (At least it didn't mistake me for a whale I guess!) So I ask the guide to get the fish to leave me alone because I can't continue to snorkel with a fish bumping into me every 30 seconds....but he can't get it away! He tells me to dive down deep and maybe that will get it to leave....no success. So I have to book it back to the boat with the little fish following me the whole way and not leaving me alone until I was totally out of the water. Nuts!!

The picture below is of a giant clam - weighs about half a ton!! At the second spot we stopped to snorkel they took us on a guided snorkel and the leader dove down and waved his hand in front of this clam and it....clammed right up!! Super cool. The clam is over a meter long!

Here are some photos of clown fish - super cute, but really small!

Look closely - strange looking fish are in this picture!

Possibly the most unusual looking fish I saw. A pufferfish?

As if all of this didn't make for a full day, D and I drove into Port Douglas (all that's there is really the marina and some restaurants) for dinner at On the Inlet, a great seafood restaurant on the water. Fantastic. The wine we ordered was so good we had to leave the car there and walk back to the hotel (not advised....no sidewalks really, not a pedestrian-friendly town!) Here are a few pictures of the waterfront at Port Douglas:

Sunday was a day for relaxing around the hotel (and for D figuring out his flight situations since he was flying back on Quantas and they grounded their planes....not fun) and then heading back into town for oysters on the water and to pick up the car. As I said earlier, I stayed around all day Monday too and really perfected my tan. A word of warning: the sun is insanely strong here - I went through an entire bottle of sunscreen in a weekend and still got as dark as I get in two weeks in Florida!!