Cairns, AU Feb 24

Our visit to Cairns was brief and wet.  It began raining on the second day of our two day sail between Sydney and Cairns and kept raining for our entire visit.  This is our ssil-in view.  You can see the fog and low clouds.  Trust me, it is raining also.

Cairns is one of the key ports for trips to the Great Barrier Reef.  I had arranged a private SCUBA trip out to the Reef for several divers on the ship.  Actually in this group of around eight divers we had each agreed to take a port and arrange the SCUBA dive for that stop.  Obviously I had Cairns.  I setup a three tank dive (means three separate dives for you land lubbers) which took us all day.  Until I started checking I didn’t realize that it takes 60-90 minutes to get to the Reef.  So just the travel was about three hours and then five hours on various parts of the Reef.  The weather wasn’t much better out at the Reef.  Here are some pictures of what we were looking at.  You can see the rain and spray on the window.  I’m inside taking the pictures, not going out there.

Since we were going ot get wet anyway diving, we jumped in.  I’m using a film camera underwater so I will not know if any pictures I took came out until after we get back.  We had three great dives on the Reef.  Saw turtles, stingrays, giant clams and all sorts of fish.  Coral was interesting took.  Visibility was down due to a lot of suspended particles in the water stirred up by recent cyclone and a number of strong storms.  Anyway, I can check diving the Great Barrier Reef off my bucket list.  I’ve spoken of diving a number of times and we still have three more stops to dive at.  But I’ve never shown you anything.  So here is a picture at 35 feet depth in a swim-through valley on the Reef.

Another view of the land coming back from the dive.  You can see that the weather had not improved.  The picture isn’t out of focus, that is fog and rain.

I got back to the ship about 5 PM.  Noreen had thought about going out during the day but decided she didn’t need to see anything that bad in the rain.  We had dinner and left the ship about 6:30 for the famous Cairns Night Market.  It is a huge gathering of small shops, boutiques and carts offering just about anything you can think of.  Fortunately it is also located inside a large building.  Noreen wasn’t going out in the rain without buying something so we are now both proud owners of genuine Kangaroo Aussie hats.  You saw hers in the Sydney pictures and now I have one.

No great pictures of Cairns.  We didn’t go far from the ship and it was really raining…have I mentioned that already?  Those that took shore tours of the famous rain forests in the area found out why they are called rain forests.  We heard stories of downed trees blocking roads, washed out railroad tracks, and a lot of scenic fog.

But it was still Cairns, Australia and the Great Barrier Reef and that is hard to beat.  Now on to New Guinea.