The Great Barrier Reef – still an unchecked point on my bucket list

A well-known saying is that “All good things come in threes” so after Hurricane Isaac in Miami and Cyclone Oswald in Brisbane it was time for the third encounter with Mother Nature’s rainy show. We got the news of a cyclone hitting the northeast coast of Australia when we were on the flight to Cairns.

We planned 12 days in Cairns and were pretty sure that we will have at least 3 days with good weather for a liveaboard in the Great Barrier Reef. The cyclone season ends in April so theoretically we did everything right but in practice it was a little bit different. So we hoped and waited and hoped again for the weather to get better…. but it didn’t. We thought about going on a scuba dive liveaboard anyway because when you’re under water you get wet anyway so it’s not that important if it’s raining though the underwater visibility gets worse. But because we learnt on the Galapagos Islands that a choppy sea can take away pretty much of the fun of a liveaboard we decided to go only on a one day trip to the Great Barrier Reef and did only one dive there. It was good but we cannot say that we experienced the best what the GBR has to offer so it’s definitely an open point on my bucket list.

So, what else can you do in a small city like Cairns if you’re stuck there for 12 days? Well, considering that the main business of 99% of the shops in town is selling day trips and liveaboards to the GBR there’s not really much of a choice. And by the 3^rd day we knew all the major streets in downtown Cairns by name so we had to get out of the city.

And there are a couple of wildlife parks around Cairns with Hartley’s Crocodile Adventures being one of the best. Here you can see the really big crocs the biggest one being Paul, a 4.6m fellow weighting more than 700 kilos. You wouldn’t think that crocs can grow up so huge. At this wildlife park they farm crocodiles so you can also get crocodile meat for lunch which I did. It’s delicious and tastes very similar to chicken breast.

We also walked on a trail through the rainforests which was quite good and because the rainforest is meant to be wet, the bad weather didn’t make a difference here. Another nice trail is one called the Waterfall Circuit which we also did and took a look at some nice waterfalls with one of them being the place where the Australian airline Qantas shoots its commercials.

So I guess this is it from the northern part of Queensland and for Australia. But we’re sure that we’ll come back to this beautiful country.

See you sooner than soon, Aussieland.

Next / Last stop

Hong Kong