Great Barrier Reef
Thursday, November 22, 2007
They let us have a sleep in, picking us up at 9.30am for a 10.00am sailing. I was fairly excited, having told Sarah just how good it was from memory (from when I was about 10!) and I was hopefull that it would still be as good. The firt thing that I noticed was that the boat was very small - strange how when you're a kid things seem so much bigger. Second thing I noticed is that there were no seats left and the boat was chocker. This was not somthing that I remember but I might not have noticed so much when I was younger. Fortunately no one had seemed to have noticed the front deck and we got a seat sitting back against the windows with a perfect breeze. It is around an hour and a half journey out to the pantoon with lunch pretty much served as soon as we got there, but we opted for a swim first then sat down and had lunch with a mini sub tour while we waited for our food to settle and then got straight back into the water. I had a digital under water camera which made swimming a bit tricky but we got some cool underwater photos. One thing that stuck hard into my memory was that you could get helicopter flights above the reef and as much as I tried to stay away from the sales man I found myself casually questioning him about the cost as I was getting a drink at the bar... As it turns out the cost was just inside that special imaginary bracket that you have in your head as the cut off for 'once in a life time' experiences - which for some reason keeps happening to me. Anyway I booked us on the return trip by helicopter instead of the boat as a surprise for Sarah (she loved it!), and we got a lovely 40Min scenic flight of the reefs, islands and Cape Tribulation and Daintree following the coast down to Port Douglas. I would recommend this to anyone. It was spectacular and I personally think that if you only went once in your life in a helicopter this would definitely be the place. The rest of the afternoon involved walking to the pier and picking up our photos from Quicksilver and then stopping off at a cocktail bar where we settled in and sampled a variety of drinks before moving ten tables or so from the bar side to the resturant side and having a wonderful sunset dinner.
Labels: Australia
posted by Maarty @ 11:24 am,
