Hello everyone, hope your all well. We have had a great week in Cairns and we are now certified divers!! We learnt to dive on a 5 day course with pro dive. The first 2 days we spent in the classroom and the pool, we were quite lucky and had a really nice small group including a canadian girl called susie,, a really funny irish guy called daniel, an austrian couple, Ivan a danish guy and Hanz from Germany who was doing his dive master course. Training in the pool was funny, lots of the skills we learnt were done in the shallow end to start with, and guess who couldnt reach the bottom... poor little me!! That made things a little bit tricky but the problems were resolved when the instructor (Aaron) got me a crate to stand on, after that i just had to put up with lots of jokes about how small i am haha! After we had sat our final exam and passed we were ready to get on the boat for our 3 days on the reef. We ended up buying snorkels, flippers and booties from the shop, so we felt like real professionals when we got onto the boat. We set off from Cairns in the cloud and rain at 6.20 in the morning, the sea was quite rough on the way out and a few people were sea sick including tris who projectile vomited all over the deck and our instructors diving equipment hehe, if your going to do it do it in style. We arrived a few hours later and did our first couple of dives on the outer barrier reef, at this point we had to be accompanied by aaron as we hadnt passed our course yet, he made us do horrible skills like flood our masks at 16 metres and clear them, this was my least favourite skill, as i have always had problems stopping myself from breathing through my nose and naturally managed to swallow half the sea when doing this skill, luckily you can still cough with your regulator in so i managed to survive. That night we had tea (the food was really good) and then got an early night. We were woken up the next morning by Kai, imagine the most stereotypical japanese accent (mr meyagee from karatee kid) shouting and banging on your door at quarter to six 'wake up wake up, dive time, dive time' not very pleasant but he was quite funny to watch. On our first dive of the day we saw a shark which was good, i was ill though after swallowing tons of sea water again and was sick when we got back on the boat. We did another dive a couple of hours later and then we were fully certified divers and were free to go down on our own, scary!! That afternoon we went off exploring and saw a sea turtle which was really good. After tea we started preparing for a night dive, I was alreay quite nervous because night time is when all the predators come out. Aaron our instructor did nothing to put my mind at rest, he told us a stroy about an incident they had had with aggressive sharks on the night dives and the procedure to use if we came across one on our dive. He told us we had to form a ring of steel around him by linking up arms, following this the shark (which can smell fear) would do a bump test on the smallest person in the ring (me!!!) at which point he told everyone that they would feel the person next to them being bumped and should break the link and inflate the bumped persons BCD making them float to the surface at high speed therefore diverting the shark away from the rest of the group!! Hes a mean mean man, i was absolutely petrified after this story which tristan found hilarious. Anyway the night dive turned out to be brilliant we saw a massive crayfish and the biggest turtle the size of a large dining table sleeping in a coral cave. On our final day we did another couple of dives, some people snorkelled including three brazilian men who were managing to free dive down to us at 11m!! We got back into Cairns later that day and said goodbye to all the friends we had made after going out into Cairns for the night.

We are now in Cape Tribulation and the Daintree forest (the oldest rainforest in the world). We will upload our photos in a few days.

Lots of love

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