Did you see that sunrise photo??? Honestly that view was just outside our window!

We had an early wake-up today so that we could catch our 7 am transfer to the snorkel/dive ship in the city of Cairns. While having our coffee, Stan looked over my shoulder and said, "Janie, turn around" - I did and there was that sunrise! It was the most fantastic sunrise I have seen in my life.

And we saw stars last night - zillions of them. We walked the beach to the Clifton Beach community of restaurants - surprisingly quite nice for a small resort town like Clifton Beach/Palm Cove. After a truly, truly delicious and wonderful dinner of beef cordon bleu and scallops, we walked back home under the stars. It was so dark that we could see our own moon shadows, and the stars were brilliant even though they were dotted with little rows of light, puffy clouds. It was really, really pretty. It was also pretty dark. Somehow some of those childhood memories of darkness came into mind; you know the ones with werewolves and strangers popping out unexpectedly. I sure was glad I had Stan. He's not scared of werewolves; he's just scared of spiders. And then we started thinking about those crocodile warning signs we saw earlier! No worries, though, soon we were home!!

Today was the Great Barrier Reef experience. And it is just that - great!!! My God, we saw schools of fish, we saw beautiful fish, and we saw huge fish (5 ft. long). We saw giant scalloped clams, sting rays, and we even saw a sea turtle! We bought a disposable underwater camera but I don't know when we will get a chance to have the film developed and photos digitized. The photos are probably not that good anyway - but we will definitely give it a shot.

Our snorkeling point on the reef was about 18 miles off the coast of northern Australia, requiring a 1.5 hours by boat to get there. We dove/snorkeled in two separate areas of the reef, did a glass-bottom boat jaunt, had lunch, met a bunch of people, and we spent all day doing these things. The people on board were mosty from all parts of Europe, and the majority of the travelers were young - mid to late twenties. These young people were raised to travel! And they do. Plus these young Europeans get 5 weeks of holiday-time very early in their career, and they work hard to earn comp time which provides them even more time-off. Some we met are touring for 3 to 6 months; then they will go back to their good jobs!! We told them in our country, unless you are a trust-fund baby and do not have to worry about a job, in order to travel, you must work a very long, long time to earn that much paid holiday time and to grow the salary sufficient to afford the trip! :-)