Port Douglas and Great Barrier Reef

It turned out to be a good decision. Port Douglas was beautiful and reminded us of Noosa (very exclusive). After a swim at our caravan park we booked a days Scuba diving on the GBR and headed into town to celebrate. An interesting evening ended in a bar watching some famous Cane Toad racing. Cane toads are an introduced species in Australia and have bred rapidly and endangered lots of native animals, as a result the Aussies hate them! Although random it was funny and Nick's toads proved much more successful than mine.

Heading off on our boat 'HABA' in the morning was very exciting. It takes about an hour from Port Douglas to get to the reef and the boat was pretty powerful. We thought it would be no probs after a few rocky days in the Whitsundays but this boat was different. It seemed to take off the top of the waves before crashing down into the next one. As a result there was a lot of sickness on the way out (not us)... We had an hours dive lesson on board learning the basic signals before kiting up for our first dive. Nick was an old pro but I was a bit nervous having never done it before. They dropped me into the water and a slight moment of panic all I could hear was "put your head under, put your head under". Once under, I relaxed a bit and started to get used to the weird sensation. The reef was pretty amazing as we swam in and among the coral we saw beautiful fish. Nick and I were a bit distressed when our instructor touched a couple of things and handed round a sea cucumber, we just hoped these things weren't endangered!

Our second dive was much better, now we knew what we were doing we swam further. We saw a lovely ray and many more fish, but not the shark Nick had hoped for 'Thank God'.