Cairns

  Cairns, Australia
Thursday, April 26, 2007

We have made it to the hot, sunny part of Australia! It's lovely. Cairns is very laid back, a real chilled out, backpacker town. Arrived very late on the Tues night so checked into a slightly more expensive hostel as it was about the only one open at 1am!
Wednesday was an Australian national holiday - Anzac day - which meant it was compulsory to go out drinking in the evening! Having no idea where to go we decided on joining a bar crawl - the frog and toad bar hop - turned out to be a good move. Lots of free and cheap drinks and some really fun games, including cane toad racing!
Changed hostels today, cheaper but still very nice and with its own pool! Spent the morning lazing in the sun and then wandered around trying to find cheap / free diving in the afternoon, gave up and bought some new fins instead!! But did  find a tree full of absolutely enormous bats...........

Have had a brief trip away from Cairns down to Alice Springs and back and I did have some luck on the diving front - got a job volunteering on one of the dive  boats as a hostie, which means helping out with cleaning/washing up etc in exchange for food, accommodation and diving! Spent 5 days on the boat Ocean Quest with Deep Sea Divers Den and did a lot of diving! Was up at around 5.30am, and in the water for the first dive at 6! Then it was straight out of the water and into the kitchen to help with breakfast, followed by another dive at 9. After the 9am dive I was vacuuming and cleaning rooms until lunch time when it was back to washing up! Helped out with the transfer of passengers after lunch and then got back in the water at 4pm, then it was dinner time so more washing up and most nights made it in for the night dive at around 7pm - but that wasn't the end of the day, we had dessert after the night dive so I had more washing up to do before I finished at around 9pm! Long days but definitely worth the effort. I finally got to dive with sharks! Saw a couple of white tip reef sharks on dives during the day and on the night dives saw lots and lots of Bronze Whaler sharks - they were really awesome! Also saw lots of turtles - found 4 on one dive!
Saw cuttlefish, triggerfish, sweetlips, clownfish, all the usual reef fish, parrotfish, a ray,  cleaner shrimp, lionfish and so much more (have lots and lots of pics!)

After 5 days getting  back to dry land was quite strange, found things swaying a bit for a while after I got back!