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Water’s edge Apartments, Cairns, Queensland, Australia

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Australian word of the day: Breaky – Breakfast

It’s been a week since the last posting. So much action going on here. I’ll give you a brief rundown. On Thursday, we spent a few hours at Trinity Beach, one of the nicer beaches to the north of Cairns. The water was a bit cold and the waves made it hard for the kids to get in. So we spent most of the time on the sand.

In the evening we went to the Tjapukai Aboriginal center for a dinner and show put on by the local aboriginals. This group has toured all over the world and garnered many prizes for their performances. We saw a fire lighting ceremony, some spear throwing, Digaridoo playing and various dances. The dinner was a crappy buffet.

On Friday morning we took a 7.5km Gondola ride over the rainforest to reach Kuranda, a tourist town with tons of shops and attractions. The ride was fun, with several stops on the way. In Kuranda, we went to the butterfly sanctuary, and enjoyed trying to photograph the butterflies that refused to stop fluttering their wings.

The return trip was on the Kuranda Scenic Railway, a train over 100 years old that travels a nice track through rain forest and savannah before reaching Cairns.

Then came Yom Kippur. We hope you all are still with us.

And then I got a “vacation from the vacation” and got on a 4 day “liveaboard” diving cruise to the Great Barrier Reef. The rest of the family spent the 4 days in Cairns doing fun kids stuff, as well as a one day excursion to Green Island, to see the reef up close as well. They floated in a glass bottom boat and a semi submersible vessel. Alfredo and Paola snorkeled a bit as well.

Back to my dive tour. There were so many cool things we saw, but the highlights have to be the two “feedings”. First feeding was at Cod Hole, where one of the dive instructors fed a giant Cod (1.5m length) as 25 of us sat in a circle watching. All this at 12 meters underwater. The second feeding was at Osprey reef, and here we saw abut 50 sharks competing for a few frozen tuna heads provided by the same instructor. It was an amazing experience, sitting on a makeshift coral amphitheatre at -14 meters, surrounded by the world’s most ancient and perfect predators as they tear apart their ‘breaky”.

The other dives were also good, with good healthy coral, excellent visibility, and a large amount of fish. Steve’s Bommie was a great pinnacle dive that we did twice and could have done several more times before getting bored.

Overall, this diving trip is almost as good as Sinai, and much better than my previous experiences in Thailand, Hawaii and Fiji. I was surprised by the number of underwater cameras people brought along. On top of that, one of the crew divers came along as the expedition photographer. I focused on the diving and let the pro shoot video and stills of our dives. And now I have a great souvenir.

Good night,

-Hemi

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 6:52 am and is filed under Australia, Big Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.