Cairns and the Reef by Mia

The plane ride to Cairns was killer! We flew to Melbourne from Auckland starting at 9 pm and ending at midnight (local time, so for us it felt like 2 am) and ‘slept’ on the floor in the airport for six hours. Needless to say, there really wasn’t much sleeping going on. Kayley, Sarah and Zander made a bed out of our luggage and the rest of us pushed together stools from the coffee shop we were sleeping in at the airport. The stools would move around every time I moved so it was hard to sleep. I only slept for like 3 hours that entire night! I slept through the flight from Melbourne to Cairns because I was so tired!

 We got into Cairns at 6 am and it was boiling! It was really hot and the air was so full of water that everything was all sticky and gross. We caught a taxi to the hotel we were staying in for the night (it was free, and it was nice—at least compared to where we had been staying!). We got two rooms and together they were pretty much bigger than the house we stayed at in Christchurch! There was a kitchen and everything! We were very excited, mostly because we had beds to sleep on. We took a 2 hour nap and swam in the pool for a while before heading to the mall for groceries. We stopped at Target for flip flops on the way. I didn’t get any because I already have sandals and I will get new shoes in Bali anyway (CANNOT WAIT!!!). We got food for dinner and breakfast at the hotel as well as the few days on Fitzroy Island. I got to pick out some ice cream to eat because it was so hot! I was very happy about that.

The next morning we got on the ferry to Fitzroy Island. Fitzroy is a little tropical island (palm trees and everything!) with a big fancy resort on it. There is also a campsite which is crap. Our absolutely lovely parents got themselves a nice two person suite and us a tent site. The tropics have got both giant bugs and giant rainstorms every night so we just pitched the tent and left it there. We brought our stuff to their room and are just sleeping on the floor in the World’s only tile floored hotel room!

We went swimming for a while and then rented some snorkel gear and went snorkeling right off the beach. The water is really warm! It’s so amazing. Compared to the only other time I have gone snorkeling it was incredible! There were actual fish and actual living coral (in Kauai there was only one fish and all the coral was dead). It was really pretty! The only bad thing was that it looked like people had dropped anchors or something on the coral because there were little dead patches every here and there. Also, there were little stingy things in the water that were really annoying! We were in the water pretty much all day because it was so hot outside. Cooked dinner on the BBQ at the campsite and there was a giant cloud of horseflies that kept trying to eat our steak so we went back to the room to eat. It was an awesome day! We just played all day long.

On the second day we got on a big boat with overzealous air-conditioning to go to see the reef. I was wearing my wet bathing suit and Daddy’s giant cotton t-shirt (also soaked—you don’t feel the humidity as much if your already wet, it also cools you down) I was freezing! The boat ride lasted for like 45 minutes before we got to a big float on the reef. We listened to a 20 min coral talk during the boat ride that mommy thinks is 50% fake, but she did learn about coral like 20 years ago, so they are looking it up. They fed us really yummy buffet lunch before we went out to snorkel on the reef. There were tons of fish and colorful coral without anchor holes! The coral was also a lot bigger that the stuff at Fitzroy Island. We even saw some sharks, which wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. We took hundreds of pictures with the new waterproof camera that daddy got at Duty Free in Auckland. We snorkeled for like 3 hours and everyone had huge sunburns on their backs when we were done. After everyone was done snorkeling they gave us afternoon tea and biscuits. Everyone could only get four each, but of course we went back and got seconds! When we got back to the island, we went out to the fancy resort restaurant for dinner to celebrate us seeing the Great Barrier Reef!