Cairns

snorkeling
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We arrived late into Cairns and had already booked a hostel so we knew where we were going from the airport, which is always handy!  We were staying at Cairns City backpackers and it was pretty nice, shared a room with a guy that was the most unbelievable sleeper!  The guy was literally sleeping 16 hours and was always in bed in the middle of the day - it was so funny.  He was from Tasmania, never seen anyone who could sleep like that.

Cairns was hot and nice, but also full of hassle for us as we tried to get organized to travel south.  Apparently everyone who was in Australia was traveling south.  We wanted to rent another camper van, but couldn't get one anywhere, and I mean anywhere because we conducted an exhaustive search!  So we conceded that we may have to rent a car...and we couldn't find one of those anywhere either!  We were planning on a few days in Cairns and ended up staying 5 to get ourselves sorted out.  We took a day out of our frustration to spend on the Great Barrier Reef.  We had booked a day cruise that included breakfast, lunch, snorkeling, and scuba diving.  Neither of us had ever tried scuba before and it's not usually something that places let you have a crack at it so we though this would be a prefect opportunity to see if we liked it, which may lead to us getting certified later on.  The first stop was 'Hastings' Reef and it was lovely.  The water was really warm but we wore wetsuits anyway to ward off the sun*

sea turtle
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*Just a side note on the sun in Australia.  It is so strong.  There is a huge hole in the ozone over Aus and the UV index has been at extreme every day since we have been here.  You can easily burn in 7 minutes if you aren't wearing sunscreen.  For extreme whitey's like ourselves this is problematic.  We had a few Aussies on our Egypt tour and one day one of them mentioned that they were not wearing sunscreen - which Mark and I thought was insane - but she said she didn't really feel like she needed it in other countries but would never not wear any when she was at home in Australia.  We both thought that this was a strange thing to say and surely the sun is the sun and it's the same everywhere?  Anyway apparently she was right, and the sun is stronger here, or seems stronger because of the ozone.

our home for the next few months
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The wetsuit did the trick (except of course that I didn't put my sunscreen up high enough on my legs and had 2 lines of sunburn on the back of my knees - very attractive) but it was very hard to dive underwater with the wetsuit on so we only wore it for the first dive when the sun was high then pu t-shirts on after that.   The reef was amazing - it was alive with all sorts of unbelievable fish and sea creatures.    We had previously been split into groups for the scuba so we snorkeling around until they called our group.

Mark saw 2 sharks, which I missed, and we both saw 4 sea turtles!  They were so cool.  you can swim very close to them and they don't even bother with you.  I also saw a huge potato cod and it was really cool.  The scuba itself was really great as well.  They make sure you are comfortable with a few commands and then took us out for a wee while.  Mark was struggling to stay under the water, the weight must not have been adjusted properly on his life jacket or something b/c he couldn't dive any deeper.  I was having the opposite problem of sinking quite low, but I loved the scuba and would love to get certified some day whenever I have the time and money.  I always thought it would make me feel really claustrophobic but it was so relaxing, you get more than enough air from the mouth piece and I never felt any sense of panic at all - it was really enjoyable.

Cairns is a nice city, if you can handle the heat.  You can't swim in the ocean along the shore here because of the box jellyfish, it was safe on the reef though b/c the jellyfish doesn't go out that far, but the local beaches are closed.   They had a really cool outdoor pool along the esplanade so it kinda feels like you are swimming in the ocean but you don't need to worry about getting stung.

We finally managed to arrange a car, after 5 days of looking, we ended up staying in Cairns alot longer than we originally thought.  After we got the car we did a few quick stops for supplies and finally hit the road.  We bought a wee stove to cook these amazing super noodles that we discovered. They are called 'Mi Goreng', altough we refer to them as 'Mr. Gong's', they are from Indonesia and they are some of the best things I have ever tasted, I honestly don't know what we would be eating if we hadn't discovered them. QWe also decided on a pop-up tent to camp in, it was slightly more expensive than other tents but we figured it was better than falling out with each other every night trying to get the tent together.

So we liked Cairns but defo got annoyed with all the travel arrangements we had to make, so we were more than ready when we got out of town.