Not like being abroad in Australia for a semester isn't vacation, but right now I'm on my two-week semester break, so it's like a vacation within a vacation haha. My one dream in coming to Australia was to visit the Great Barrier Reef, and I'm finally getting to do it! Some friends and I are taking these two weeks to fly up to Cairns and then work our way down the east coast. Some of us are traveling by Greyhound bus and staying in hostels (Benedicte, Alex, Viivi, and myself) and the rest are renting a van and driving down themselves (Bethany, Bubba, James, Trevor, Gabe, Jacob, Kyle, and Lyndsay).
On our first day in Cairns, we arrived around 7 pm, so we didn't do much. We checked into our hostel, a place called Corona Backpackers Hostel. The receptionist, Angelo, is one of the coolest people I've met. He's super chill and really helpful. He helped us book a bunch of activities and even got us 20% off! And our hostel is nice and clean! (not always the case with hostels I guess). Alex, Viivi, Benedicte (aka Benny) and I are staying in a 4 person air-conditioned room, so it's a pretty ideal situation. Our hostel provides us with meal tickets that get us a discount at a local restaurant, so we went there for dinner. The restaurant is a saloon type place called the Woolshed. It's got a pretty good vibe to it, and we can get nice steak dinners for only $8 with our hostel cards.
On our second day, Sunday, we got up and did some grocery shopping then went to Palm Cove beach. It was an absolutely beautiful day, and we got lots of time out in the sun! Unfortunately, even though I put sunscreen on 3 times, I got pretty burned:/ The water was nice and warm, and we had a great day. The only thing that was a bummer was that we could only swim in a netted-off area in one part of the water, because it's jellyfish (aka stinger) season and there are also a lot of crocodiles in this part of the ocean. Other than that, it was great:)
On Monday we went to the Great Barrier Reef!!! It was easily one of the best days of my life. I've been wanting to go to the reef ever since I was little, when I used to be obsessed with whales, dolphins, and other marine life. Originally, I just signed up to snorkel in an effort to save money. When we got there though, my friend Lyndsay, who had signed up for one intro dive, found out that she wasn't allowed to dive because she has asthma. So I got to swap places with her for only $20 or so. We went to our first site in the morning. I started out snorkeling around to get used to being in the water and everything. Alex even let me use his underwater camera to take pictures of the reef! The water was warm and it was so beautiful. After about 30 minutes, they called me in to go diving. We got outfitted with oxygen tanks and all the other gear and hopped back in. I was pretty nervous at first, but the guide (Fraser) was very helpful. When I first started to descend, my ears were hurting pretty badly, but after a while I fixed it by "equalizing", which is plugging your nose and blowing out of it to get air into your sinuses and stuff. Diving was awesome because we could get right up close to the reef and all the fish and animals at the bottom. We saw a stingray, some giant clams, and other cool things.
After diving, we ate lunch and went to the next site on the reef. This time I just snorkeled. But it was awesome! The reef was closer to the surface at the second site, so I could snorkel over it and still be right up close. The variety in plants and animals was amazing and so beautiful. All the beauty really made me think of God, and how He created all of this for us to enjoy, and how beautiful He must be to create scenery like this. I could have stayed there for hours taking it all in. I almost got hit in the face by a jellyfish though, and I even saw a shark! It was a small White-Tipped Reef Shark, so I wasn't scared. The only thing that I didn't get to see that I wanted to was a turtle. Kyle said he saw a turtle eating a jellyfish, which would've been awesome. Oh well!
After that we went back to the hostel, showered, and went to dinner. That night, everyone else went out to the bars, but I stayed back and had a nice quiet reading time and went to bed early:)
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