Christmas in Cairns: Great Barrier Reef

Aussie Slang word of the day is…

Stickybeak: A nosy person

Hope everyone had an amazing Christmas and new years! Happy 2011! :) I can't believe next month we'll have been in Perth for a year. Time flies! I’ve decided to break up our holiday in Cairns into 4 different posts, one post for each activity we did. It would take too long to cram it into one post… because let's be honest, you know how I like to ramble. ;) We'll start it off with our 5 day trip to the Great Barrier Reef. yeeee haw! here it goes...
We arrived in Cairns (pronounced Cans) in Queensland Australia at about 6:00 am (Perth time 4:00 am), after a 4 hour red eye flight. We had to sleep in the airport for an hour to wait for the hostel to open. Luckily the airport was deserted so we sprawled out on the benches and zonked out for a good hour. The shuttle bus then took us to the ‘Travellers Oasis’.

It was pouring rain when we arrived. It is currently their wet season and since Cairns is in the rain forest, they tend to get a lot of heavy rain fall this time of year. There has been massive flooding in all of Queensland, so we were a bit worried that the weather would put a damper on our holiday. Fortunately we had great weather the rest of the trip!
We spent the day lounging around and napping until the shuttle picked us up to go on the boat.

The 5 day, 4 night trip consisted of 14 dives around the Great Barrier Reef. We typically did around 3-4 dives a day. We woke up every morning at 6:30 had breakfast and were in the water by around 7:30 am. Each dive was an hour long or until you reached 50 bar of air. Then we would pick up anchor and move to another site. My favorite dive sites were Light House Bommie, Steve’s Bommie and Sandras (you can google them if you are interested). Below are some of our scuba diving pictures! I only selected a few to post. To see more pictures click on the link.

Onboard TAKA

Brandon and I got advance scuba certified on the trip, so we could go down to 30 meters (100 feet). Us with you our dive instructor Katie. :)

(the okay sign is what you do underwater to let your dive buddy know you are okay).

Scuba gear

Scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef was one word, a-ma-zing! It was by far the highlight of the whole vacation for me. It is something I have wanted to do my whole life. (My parents like to think I was a fish in another life). There is no way to describe how beautiful the Great Barrier Reef is. You feel like you are swimming in a huge aquarium where you are surrounded by schools of fish and fascinating, vibrant aquatic life. The pictures don’t do it justice. Some of my favorite sea creature encounters were nemo (clown fish), puffer fish, pipe fish, sting ray, lion fish, reef shark and sea turtle.

Scuba Brandon and Scuba Lisa

Scuba diving on Christmas Day

Merry Christmas!


Reef shark
We saw this bad boy circling the reef. Thank goodness it didn't get too close to us.


Lion fish= very poisonious, but beautiful

We found Nemo!

One downside to the trip was due to stong winds, we weren't able to make it out to Cod Hole or Osprey Reef as originally planned. The Shark feeding frenzy was suppose to be at Osprey Reef (it is one of the only places you can feed sea animals), so we weren't able to see it, which we were a bit bummed out about. However, overal it was a blast!We met a lot of cool people on board from all over the world, had outstanding food and got to see lots of cool sea creatures. I highly recommend it!