Adios Australia

So we arrived in Cairns yesterday and I'm officially in love with this place. The city is pretty much a tropical seaside community of roughly 140k people but it's stunning. To the west it's entirely surrounded by lush jungle mountains and to the east is the Coral Sea. The people are friendly, the seafood is second to none and I don't want to leave.

This morning we woke up and trekked north to Port Douglas where we boarded a massive high speed catamaran to the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef (Agincourt Reef to be specific). It was an experience of a life time. GORGEOUS! Jacob, Tierney and I took our crash course in scuba diving while on the boat out there and once we arrived at what I'll describe as a tiny floating city on the reef we headed to the dive section. Here's a picture of the boat docked at the platform on the reef.

We opted to wear the protective dive suits since someone was stung by box jelly fish last week. Didn't really want to end up recovering in a hospital for the next few weeks. Anyway, we got all geared up and took our first steps into the water for an initial introduction to the art of breathing under water. That was an extremely strange experience and really took a bit to get used to. So we finally began our slow descent into the reef. I'll never forget it. We swam down to a giant clam that was easily 4 feet in length and were allowed to put our hand into it to feel the fleshy inside. It ended up not liking that and slammed its mouth shut. There was such an amazing variety of wildlife...simply awe inspiring. Fortunately they filmed most of our dive and I bought it on DVD to show interested parties.

We're now back at the hotel and are in for a very short nights sleep as we have to be on our way to the airport by 4am. We'll be off to Brisbane to catch our connecting flight out of Australia and on to Auckland, New Zealand. Talk to you all soon from the land of Kiwi's.