Day 6
Boy, was it a looong day. And the way this trip is planned, there are many more just around the corner! So, after waking up at 3:20 AM in Auckland (which turns out to be 1:20 AM local time in Cairns), we made it to the airport where we caught our first 3+ hour flight to Sydney. Although it was slightly delayed, we managed to catch our next 3+ hour connecting flight to Cairns. Thank God! =)
Once on the ground, we made our way to our hostel (which is much more like the cheap hostels that I remember from S. America… our hostel in Auckland was really *nice*!) to drop off our stuff before venturing out to explore the city a bit.
Cairns is a small little port city that we navigated pretty quickly. After spending some time on the Esplanade (boardwalk along the coast), we headed over to the dive shop to get our gear picked out for our 3 Day / 2 Night dive trip onboard the M.V. Scubapro!
Days 7 to 9
The 3 days we spent diving on the Milln and Flynn reefs of the Outer Great Barrier Reef are a blur of amazing memories of the best diving I’ve ever experienced. Each of the 11 dives (including 2 night dives) was a “favorite” with so many things to see including turtles, sharks, sting rays, barracuda, eels, giant clams (and by giant, I mean, big enough for me to fit inside!), sea anemones and clownfish (Nemo, his family and cousins!), and numerous other fish and diverse coral formations.
Needless to say, words can’t do justice to the amazing sights that we witnessed so here is just a small sample of some of God’s amazing undersea creation! (Some additional photos on Facebook…)
We found Nemo!!
Sleeping White-tip Reef Shark
Coral formations
Butterflyfish
Giant Clam
Sea Turtle!
Firefish
What an amazing 3 days of exploring the undersea world! =)