SCUBA DIVING IN THE GREAT BARRIER REEF!

So another five hour Greyhound ride and we made it to Carnes, our last stop in OZ. We went out the first night to The Wilshed, another bar where everyone dances on the tables...don't know what it is about everyone dancing on tables but it always seems to make for the best nights! The next day we started our 5 day scuba diving trip. The first two days were boring videos and quizes in a classroom followed by diving in a pool...so crazy breathing under water the first time! The next day we boarded our boat that we would be staying on for the next two nights to do some real diving in the Great Barrier Reef! The boat was amazing...so pretty, amazing food, and we had our own room that even had a TV in it! The first four dives were with our instructor, to complete our training for our Open Water Certification. We had to show him that we could do all these tricks under water that we learned in the pool, like take off your eqipment and put it back on or breath with your buddy in case you ran out of air, use a compass.... that kind of stuff. The dives were all amazing though! The coral is so beautiful, with tons of colorful, sometimes massive, fish swimming around. We saw stingrays and reef sharks (not as scary as we thought) and some of the craziest reef formations. It was like straight out of Finding Nemo down there! So after we finished our first 4 dives (and passed our test) we still had 6 fun dives! Not sure what we really thought that meant but basically our instructor said "k you're free to go dive on your own now!" At first we thought he was kidding...yeah right would he send us down there alone! He definitely wasn't kidding, in fact we would have had to pay extra for him to go down again with us haha So we thought 'what the hell,' he seems to think we'll be okay and we did the next couple dives by ourselves, it was great! We were just starting to feel really confident in our diving skills until we remembered that our last night was our night dive, sooo scary. Basically you dive at night to see sharks! The light from the boat attracts the sharks all around so when you are gearing up you look down and there are sharks swimming right where you are supposed to jump into the water. This was a guided dive, of course. Basically, it was terrifying. But once we got the courage to jump in it was incredible. There were four of us diving together and when we all swam together there was quite a bit of light from all of our flashlights...BUT if you looked back, left, right, anywhere else pretty much, it was like looking into a black abyss-kinda freaky! We saw tons of sharks swimming around us, which was actually not as scary as we thought it was going to be, it was just really cool. Needless to say we were on such a rush when we got out of the water that night, as we were after every dive pretty much! The last day we had three more dives and we were so excited because we had rented out the digital camera for the night dive and our last three dives BUT we woke up and they said a cyclone was approaching OZ and the visibility wouldn't be too good, which it definitely wasn't. So we don't really have any great photos, except a few we managed to get of each other and a really funny video of us freaking out before the night dive and one really cool video clip of a shark, all posted below...

The diving trip was definitely a highlight of our trip thus far, we absolutely loved it! It's addicting though and we are so tempted to do it everywhere here in Asia...could be an expensive little hobby we picked up!