An Ambitious Journey to Australia 3: Great Barrier Reef

Part 1 was entitled “An Ambitious Journey to Australia 1: The Flinders Outback”. This was a 6-day 3-jeep adventure to the Mawson Plateau in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia.

Part 2 was entitled “An Ambitious Journey to Australia 2: Search for Opals.” This was a 3-day trip by car to Coober Pedy, also in the outback of Australia. Apart from amazing underground homes, apartments, stores, and restaurants, we actually dug up a raw opal that the miners had missed.

The previous days of our third Australian adventure consisted of a flight from Adelaide to Cairns, which is way up in the tropical north of the country. I wanted to experience once again the glories of the Great Barrier Reef.

We booked a hotel in Palm Cove, an area of natural beauty but with lots of hotels and restaurants, about 30 miles north of Cairns. Our hotel was on the beach. Kim is sitting at an outdoor restaurant called Raffles right next to the hotel. We loved the seafood platter with grilled barramundi, scallops, and shrimp – we shared it two nights in a row.

This is the Palm Cove beach. Although it is late June, which is winter in Australia, Palm Cove is in the tropics, where it’s about 70F each day, and very pleasant. A few people were swimming, although it rained on and off while we were there. I should have taken a photo of a sign on the beach. It said, Do not swim here in the summertime, because in summer tiny jellyfish swim here, and are so poisonous they can kill you in 4 minutes.

We arranged three separate day tours. The first was to Josephine’s waterfall where we drove our car rental. We walked a mile through the rainforest which got to Kim. She said she would try using this photo as an ad in a dating website.

We did not see a cassowary, the other flightless bird of Australia (the emu is the first). The tree fern in the pic is the biggest one I’ve ever seen – about 50 feet tall.

Josephine Falls was spectacular. I love waterfalls, and this one was huge. A couple folks actually took a swim in a pool below the Falls.

On Day 2, we took a ride on an old steam train, through the forest, and past waterfalls, lasting about two hours. We ascended a few thousand feet to the Cairns Highlands which I recall learning about in primary school.

The train stopped in the Barron gorge to view the Barron waterfall, but in June it was disappointing. The fall is a raging monster in January which is the middle of the wet season (see photo below), but June is the dry season and the waterfall was not much more than a trickle.

We spent an hour in Kuranda village where I bought a couple of boulder opals. The return trip was much faster – we took the Skyrail down as it sailed over the canopies of the forest.

Day 3 was the most challenging. I wanted to get Kim to the Great Barrier Reef. It wasn’t cheap because the best coral is in the outer reef, and this takes an hour and a half by boat. It’s a big boat that carried 300 passengers and it was full on the day we went. We were the last group of people to board, and the only seats were in the back of the boat. Kim swallowed her sea-sick pill and off we went.

My goal was to snorkel to the edge of the abyss, where the coral drops off suddenly and the ocean water becomes a thousand feet deeper and scarier. Many years ago, when we were married, Mary Ann had swum to the edge of the abyss on a day when I couldn’t go because I was ill. A friend of mine, a geologist called Steve, had held her hand while snorkeling because she was afraid of the ocean. He told me he had escorted her out to the abyss, and she told me it was awfully scary.

Before I could get to the abyss, I had to get my wetsuit on. That was a challenge for me. Kim had hers on and came to see why I was struggling. She turned away laughing, and couldn’t stop, because I was trying to put my second leg into an arm of the wetsuit, and of course it wouldn’t fit. Kim did stop laughing enough to help me get the damn thing on.

When we got to the dock where you enter the water, the guide told me my life jacket was too large, then he told me my flippers were too large. I told him I had high arches and needed large flippers, but he refused to listen.

Finally, I was ready to jump in and I asked him how far out was the abyss. He frowned and asked who told me about the abyss. When I replied my ex-wife, he shook his head laughing. He pointed to a thin line of breakers about 500 yards away. That’s where the abyss is, he said. If you swim out there the boat will return without you, he added. So that goal was crushed.

We swam around for about 45 minutes and saw a huge clam like this one, with blue-green color inside it.

The coral existed in large clumps like small hills that came and went. The inner reef coral I had seen once before was small and flat and nothing like this.

The coral we saw looked nothing like the color in the photo below, and I’ll explain this. First, the only way Kim and I could take photos was with our iPhones when we were in the submarine, shown in the picture below.

We sat in the glass bottom of the submarine and beneath water level so we could see different corals as the captain motored us around. However, the corals looked to be a darker shade when we viewed them through the glass.

Second, the day was only partly sunny, and all corals look more colorful in the sunshine.

I’ll finish with a story. In the first, I had trouble with my snorkel breathing tube. I kept inhaling water and had to come up for air, to cough water from my lungs, and to blow the water out of my tube. I’m still unsure whether seawater got in when my tube leaked or whether I mounted it at the wrong angle to my head so the little waves on the surface spilled into my tube.

While trying to resolve this problem, I kept losing sight of Kim underwater. I came up next to her about two feet away and admonished her, “Kim you have to stay close so I don’t lose you. Please keep close to me.” Just then a second head with goggles rose up from the water next to Kim. I suddenly realized it wasn’t Kim that I’d been talking to and chastising. Ah well, we all make mistakes!

Once again, during stage 3 of our trip down under, I met most of my goals. Kim and I forged beautiful memories that will linger forever in our minds. I do thank God that we didn’t get hurt and were safe during the entire remarkable trip.
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No mention of coral and crystal can be made;
For the possession of wisdom is even above [that of] rubies or pearls.
[From Job chapter 28, Amplified Bible]
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