For our last few days in Australia we rented a car and drove to Katoomba to do some hiking in the Blue Mountains National Park. Less than two hours from the beaches of Sydney we were deep into dense forest and mountains (max elevation of 3000 ft) abounding with waterfalls. We stopped on the way to our apartment and did a quick hike to Wentworth Falls. It was nice but given it was Saturday, it was crowded with tourists so we cut our hiking short and headed off to ...

For our final two weeks in Australia we returned to Sydney. I had been wanting to stay at a Meriton Serviced Apartments since we started planning for this trip. They looked great online and got great reviews, but were pretty expensive. At last we were checking in to one in the suburb of Zetland (about 30 minutes by bus from downtown and pretty much everywhere else we wanted to go). It far surpassed our expectations. It was spacious, clean, modern, and best of al...

We arrived back in Cairns at 6:00am and were kicked off the boat by 7:30am. We picked up our rental car and headed to our hotel where we hung out poolside until our room was ready. It was great to be back in a roomy apartment in Cairns with a much better bed than we had in our cabin. We discovered a huge bat (flying fox) colony right in the middle of town. After all our efforts to get bat pictures in Brisbane, here were thousands of them. We took our cameras and...

I finally finished the dive videos from our week long live-aboard on Spirit of Freedom. There are 2 videos. The first is a compilation of various clips from our 25 dives. It's 6.5 minutes long. (Higher resolution version available on Youtube at http://youtu.be/22TikhjZMIo )The second is a video of the Shark Feed dive. It is a little less than 3 minutes long. (Higher resolution version available on Youtube at http://youtu.be/7RJBwGdIZJc ) Hope you enjoy them. ...

We arrived in Brisbane on Tuesday the 18th, stop 6 in Australia, just as cyclone Marcia was building. While Brisbane is not right on the coast, it is close enough for the forecast to call for rain the first 5 days of our stay. Cyclone Marcia was a category 5 by the time it struck about 200 miles north of Brisbane. It did lots of damage up there but we only got the rain and some wind. We bravely booked a bicycle tour for day one and luckily it was mostly rain fr...