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!

Magnetic Island

To break up our bus ride from Airlie Beach to Cairns we decided to do a stop in Magnetic Island. When we first arrived, we were a little confused, having no idea why we had decided to stop here. Its basically a small island off the coast of Australia that is really quiet, had a really small hostel, and was extremely hot. After trekking for about a mile to find some place that would serve lunch, we met up with one of our friends, Neils, who we met in the Whitsunday Islands. He had done some reading and suggested we rent a "Moki" (really small car with no doors) and drive around the island.

At 9am we headed off for our adventure with 2 more of Neils friends following in another car. Our frist stop was to take a 2 hour walk where we were supposed to get great views and see koalas right on the path. Of course, because we are cursed when it comes to seeing wildlife, we saw no kaolas, and compared to the really hot, not so great hike, the views were only ok. So that part of the adventure done, we decided to head to the waterfall we had heard about. When we walked there it turned out to only be a small creek, but at least it was somewhere to cool off. Next we headed to a little beach on the north side of the island where we hung out for a few hours and got lunch. After a while the other 2 with us decided it was time to return their car. Since we couldn't all fit in the car on the way back we decided to get dropped off at the hike again to see if we could see any koalas later in the afternoon....of course no suck luck. While we were waiting for the others to come back and pick us up we found our car had broken down a ways down the road and we had to walk to it and wait for a new car! (so far not sounding so good...but so far it was a good laugh and still fun!) After getting into a new and working car we decided to try the waterfall again because we must have gone to the wrong spot. Sure enough we found the right waterfall and practiced swinging off the rope swing into the pool of water below. One our way to the next stop, Nelis decided it was time for the two of us to learn to drive a manual car. So after 5 minutes of lessions we both gave it a go. Verdict is....we don't suck! We made in a few kilometers down the road successfully with no accidents! It was really exciting! Our next stop was to see the wallabees (mini kangaroos). When we got there, expecting not to see anything, there were wallabees everywhere! They were the cutest things we have ever seen. There was a guy there, who knew a lot about the place, that gave us all a little bit of food to feed them. They would come right up to your hand and place their little hands on your fingertips and eat right out of your palm. It as precious and we wanted to take them all home with us! Just this part of the day alone made up for the kind of awful hike, breaking down car, and lack of koalas. We were so excited to get to pet and feed them it was unbelievable! Conclusion: Great Adventure!