Tuesday Oct 16/07 - Airlie Beach, Australia

Nicola and I at the Lagoon in Airlie Beach

Our Tour boat with one of the Reefs in the background

The Lagoon in Cairns, great place to relax

Helicopter view of one of the few thousand individual reefs which make up the Great Barrier Reef

Well it's been almost a week in Australia and we absolutely love it here. It's been a trip down memory lane for Nicola as she takes Jen and I to all the places she used to hang out and a shock for her to see all that has changed. Cairns was amazing, incredibly hot and sunny almost every day and a very relaxed city, light clothing and flip flops are the fashion standard for everyone. There is a great man-made lagoon which proved an excellent swimming hole and tanning place and we enjoyed most of our time just relaxing and soaking up the sun, with plenty of sunscreen lotion on of course. You can burn in a matter of 5 minutes here, the sun is so powerful, walk down the street with no lotion on and you will literally feel your skin burning.

While in Cairns we had to take a day trip out to the Great Barrier Reef, a must for all visitors and it's really not very expensive either. For a full day trip on a big boat out to two separate reefs that were 65kms off-shore including all of your snorkeling equipment, food, and one introductory scuba dive it was only $114 with all the taxes included. The day-trip was amazing, however the one day that we were supposed to go I was not feeling well once we got to the dock so I decided to opt out and go the next day. Jen and Nicola ended up getting a little bit better weather than I did, and we all opted for the upgrade to a Helicopter trip back from the reef to Cairns which took us for a tour of a few different reefs. While out at sea we had about 5 hours to snorkel on the two different reefs which was incredible. They are very shallow so snorkeling is a great way to see everything, usually the coral is just a few feet below you. Nicola and I also opted to try Scuba Diving at one of the reefs which was also fun, it allowed us to see some of the different parts of the reef, and of course go diving which is awesome. I'm definitely hooked on diving now and will likely do some more on Ko Tao in Thailand as it is apparently even cheaper there and the dive sites are supposed to be world class. I bought a cheap underwater camera for the day trip out to the reef but it turned out to be a piece of garbage and none of the pictures really turned out so unfortunately there are no underwater pictures so far. However, I managed to find a pretty good deal on a underwater digital camera that can go down to 50 feet so we should be able to get some pictures on our adventures ahead.

After our time in Cairns was up we hopped on the 'overnight' bus from Cairns to Airlie Beach. Overnight busses are popular with backpackers here as it means you aren't wasting a precious day on the bus, and you save one nights accomodation. It's an 11 hour drive down the coast so we are glad that we were able to sleep through some of it...sort of. Airlie Beach is a fairly small, yet rapidly growing, tourism town which exists as the gateway to the Whitsunday Islands. This is a collection of 74 Islands of the coast of Australia which are world renowned for their beauty and white sandy beaches. Tomorrow we are very excited to be going on a 3 day, 3 night tour of these islands on a Catamaran style boat which will have about 16-20 of us with 4 crew members. They will take us around to all the key spots throughout the beautiful area with the opportunity to dive and snorkel our days away. At night we sleep on the boat and all the food is catered so we are really really looking forward to tommorow, hopfully the wind stays calm enough to go ahead with it. Once again, this trip is quite a good value for the money when you consider all that is included in the price so it doesn't totally break the bank, even for us backpackers. When we return from this tour we should hopefully have some great pictures and stories to share.

Nicola back again:

Hi everyone! So Mark basically filled you all in. We are in Airlie Beach awaiting to be pampered over the next few days on a luxury yacht...well it sure seems like that to us backpackers!

Cairns was so awesome. I had a great time there. Jen and I spent many many many hours shopping as Cairns has some of the best shopping in Australia, if not the best. Our day trip out to the reef was amazing aside from the rough waters which caused Jen to get pretty sick. (That was part of the reason we opted for the helicopter ride back instead of another couple of hours on the boat.) The snorkeling was so cool. I managed to swim a few metres above a Reef Shark unbeknown to me until I happened to glance down. Knowing it would freak Jen out I just told her to come back with me to the ship as sharks are not on her list of things to swim with. I thought it was freaky and awesome at the same time. My scuba dive proved to be less freaky and just awesome. There were so many fish at the bottom of the reef and I also got to swim along side a giant sea turtle. Very cool. Our helicopter ride was exciting, full of beautiful sights, we could see tons of sea turtles below and a couple of huge sharks sitting on top. It was moving too fast to get that many good pictures but still something to remember forever.

Airlie Beach is nice and hot. The lagoon is a good place to chill out. Our hostel here is pretty sweet and we leave tomorrow night for the sailing trip. Can't wait!