Kearse and I took off to Cairns in the north, looking forward to some more warm weather. Cairns reminded me of Florida... in that it is a super humid, short (as in height) little beach town with old looking buildings worn away by salt and wind. However, Cairns is famous for its location near the world's largest living organism- the Great Barrier Reef! Depending on which source you consult, the Great Barrier Reef covers anywhere from 280,000 to 344,000 square kilometers, and stretches anywhere from 1200 to 1600 miles from top to bottom (the length of the west coast of the United States. The Great Barrier Reef contains at least 1500 species of fish, 400 types of coral, and 4000 varieties of mollusks, but those are essentially just guesses as no one has ever attempted a comprehensive survey- must be too big a job.
So of course the Number One thing on our to-do list was to Scuba Dive at the Reef! We took a day trip out to the reef and had a fantastic time! While I'm a certified Scuba diver, Kearse had never dived before. Luckily, there are tours that give you a briefing, run through some of the important skills, and take you on introductory dives with a guide. It was so exciting that Kearse got to dive for the first time at the reef! He did three dives today, awesome!
As for me, the dive crew decided not to let me dive today... Apparently athletically-induced asthma is the most dangerous form of asthma to have when diving, and even though I've been off of an inhaler for a year, they said it wasn't enough time (haha and I told them two years... Oh well). So I got to snorkel... but it ended up being really amazing!
The benefits to snorkeling- you can explore the parts of the reef that are only a meter or two below the surface of the water, you can see more brilliant colors in the sunlight than at the depths the divers are at, you can listen to a snorkel guide talk about the fish, coral, and sea life that you are seeing, and if you really want to, you can dive down and swim with the scuba divers because they are only four to five meters deep the whole time (and of course I definitely dove down and swam with the scuba divers, it was Kearse's first time diving after all).
But wow I cannot even begin to name all of the awesome creatures and life that I saws at the reef. I can't even name 20% of what I laid my eyes on! I saw brain coral, fan coral, anemones, urchins, and sea cucumbers! I even stuck my hand in a huge purple clam the size of small car! I got to stare face-to-face with a moray eel, and follow a couple sea turtles on the surface. I swam above a school of squid (yum!), and through schools and schools of fish (which was my favorite part)! I also loved the way the light filtered through the water and danced along the coral. Captivating!
During my snorkel, I could see a lot of broken coral lying on the ocean floor, covered in sand. This was the damage done by Cyclone Yasi when it blew through the area two weeks before (remember that's why we went to New Zealand early and then back-tracked to Cairns).
I loved observing the huge and brilliantly colored and striped fish eating off of the coral- ah so many bright colors! Purple, blue, teal, yellow, turquoise, violet! It was so brilliant! I liked diving down and swimming in the canyons between shelves of reefs, and floating like a star fish above the super shallow parts, letting the waves move me across the reef. There were a few times were a just had to take a break from al of the snorkeling just to take it all in! This is awesome! Dad, you need to come to Cairns and do this ASAP! No worries, I'll come with you!
After our dive/snorkel trip, we had an awesome dinner at this cute Greek restaurant near our hostel. This restaurant is so legit. It's owned and run by an old, plump Greek man who likes to give the girls hugs and kisses. The tables had stark white table clothes dressed in blue, just like the colors in Santorini. I had an incredible dinner of scallops, mussels, and huge prawns on a bed of spaghetti, yum yum yum! Oh yeah, and some baklava of course! I asked the owner about the dance where you throw plates, and he proceeded to throw plates at my feet until I got up and danced with him. Ten the waiters started getting other customers up from their tables and we formed a long Congo line and did the zombi dance with plates being thrown at our feet and yelling OPAAAA! It was fantastic! I really want to go to Greece!
The next day in Cairns, Kearse and I took a day trip to the Daintree Rainforest. It was really nothing spectacular, and kind of boring and very humid and sticky and uncomfortable. We stopped at a local ice cream shop though and tried flavors made from the local fruits, like supote (a chocolate flavor), wattle seed (a coffee flavor), mango, and banana. I think the best thing about the Daintree Rainforest are the facts: the Daintree is the oldest rainforest in the world at 350 million years old (the Amazon is only 30 million years old)! It is a remnant of the time when the world was a single landmass, and as the continents split up, the Daintree escaped the more dramatic changes of climate and orientation that spurred ecological change elsewhere. Consequently, there are plants out there-whole families of plants-that survived no where else, like hanging fig trees, mangroves with huge buttresses of roots, and tea leaves (I bought some Danitree Tea, so excited to try some back home)!
One of the plants in the Daintree Rainforest is called Gimpy Gimpy. "Gimpy" in the aboriginal's language means "pain", so when they say "pain" twice, you know they mean business. The Gimpy Gimpy is like poison ivy, but it doesn't leave red itchy bumps on your skin. Instead, when you brush up against the Gimpy Gimpy leaves, thousands of minute fibers bore into your skin, and the more you move, the deeper the fibers go until they rest on your nerves. These fibers are sensitive to temperature, so when you are hot (like when you are exercising and sweating) or when you are cold (like when you jump into a river), you feel the sharp stinging and burning of the Gimpy Gimpy. These burning effects are felt for four to six months after exposure to the Gimpy Gimpy!! Yikes!
In fact, in this one rainforest alone, there are more things that will kill you than anywhere else in Australia!! From Bill Bryson- "The cassowary is the flightless, man-sized bird with a razor claw on each foot with which it can slice you open in a deft and appallingly expansive manner; and the green tree snakes that dangle from branches and so blend into the foliage that you don't see them until they are clamped onto a facial extremity; the small but fearsomely poisonous blue-ringed octopus, whose caress is instant death; and the elegant but irritable numb ray, which moves through the water like a flying carpet discharging 220 volts of electricity into anything that troubles its progress; and the loathsome, sluggish stonefish, so called because it is indistinguishable from a rock, but with the difference that it has twelve spikes on its back that are sharp enough to pierce the sole of a sneaker, injecting the hapless sufferer with a myotoxin bearing a molecular weight of 150,000, which means pain beyond description followed shortly by muscular paralysis, respiratory depression, and cardiac palpitations. Then there are the feared box jellyfish and the dreaded saltwater crocodiles. The Daintree is also home to the celebrated, and extremely shy, tree kangaroo."
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