Walking Around Cairns

To the right of the marina, the walkway along the water continues past the construction zone, paralleling the ocean. Cairns has no natural beach there used to be a mangrove forest along the water and now it is just empty mud flats, so the ocean isn’t a real pretty view. You can’t swim in the ocean, especially because crocodiles live in mud. Just beyond the marina begins a long park that the walkway runs through. The park goes on for quite a ways. In the section of the park closest to the marina there is an enormous “lagoon”, which is a man made shallow swimming pool that has a small bit of sand on one side to give it a beach feel. This picture only shows a small portion of the “lagoon”. The pool is really nice and it seems to always be packed with people.

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There are a lot of trees in the park. Most of them look newer, like they were recently planted, but there are also quite a few older trees. The more mature trees have heaps of birds in them, and as you walk along the boardwalk they all chirp so loudly that it seems like they are screaming at one another. If you look carefully, you can see Continue reading

Diving the Barrier Reef and Eating Bugs

Continued from yesterday”¦..

After the second dive lunch was served. It was a nice lunch with salad fixings and sandwich fixings, pasta salad and potato salad. We scarfed our food while the boat traveled to the next site, called Gone Again.

Forty minutes after finishing the last dive, we were back in for the third dive. Talk about pushing the limits on the surface interval between dives! This was another Continue reading

Customs and Quarantine in Australia

Cairns (pronounced Cans) is located in the state of Queensland on the northeastern coast of Australia, inside the Great Barrier Reef. When the English first began settling Australia, a penal colony was established in the south of the state. From there, graziers, miners and small farmers pushed farther west and north into what is now the state of Queensland. Mining that continues today includes coal, copper, zinc and lead. Farming includes meat, wheat, and sugar. Cairns was originally established as a port town to export goods produced in the general region, being ideally situated where the mouth of a river meets the bay, with a wide channel through the reef out to the ocean. Products could be sent to Cairns via rail or boat, and then loaded onto cargo ships for export. Today, Cairns has become one of the most popular tourist destinations in all of Australia. Queensland has a population of approximately 3.86 million people. The city of Cairns only accounts for about 100,000 of those people.

Customs and quarantine were at the boat within a few minutes of our arrival to clear us in. All of them were very nice, offering all kinds of helpful information. All were professional and proficient at their jobs. The quarantine officer asked to see the food stores, then began systematically going through all the food. We had been clever and cooked up everything that we knew would get confiscated. We found out Continue reading

Seeing the Coolidge’s Lady and Million Dollar Point

This morning we were surprised to see two more people in the boat when they picked us up. One was diving with us, the other would be snorkeling. Christi and Jaime were going to go deeper into the Coolidge to see “the lady” with the same dive master we went in with yesterday. Eric and Darren were going out with another dive guider to do the promenade deck dive.

Eric and Darren descended from a nearby sand patch and followed a line that runs from shore to the bow, instead of going down the mooring line. Eric is more comfortable starting from shallow water and going deeper than he is starting in deep water. The descent was scary for him since he couldn’t see the bottom, just a nothingness of blue below. He was relieved when the ship came into sight. Eric made it abundantly clear that he did not want to go inside the ship at all he only wanted to swim around the exterior areas. They did the same the same route Jaime and Christi did the day before, except that they didn’t go into any of the cargo holds.

Christi and Jaime and the dive master again descended down the line to the bow. This time they continued over the starboard side of the boat, which is now the top since it is leaning on it’s side. They passed over a long series of portholes with the glass long gone. There was a cluster of colorful, pretty corals of assorted varieties at the edge of all the portholes. There were quite a few small clusters of coral over the top. Christi spotted a lionfish, which are neat to watch.

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They came to a blast hole in the metal hull, where they descended straight down into the relatively dark interior. Once again, only Continue reading

Luganville and the Traditional Dinner and Dance Show

Continuation from yesterday”¦.

There were quite a few shops, most selling a strange assortment of random goods, kind of like mini Targets with just a few food items, a few clothes, a few home improvement items, etc. It looks like they stock whatever they can get their hands on to sell. Eric did manage to find a used propeller for Kosmos that he thinks will help with speed.

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We walked the length of town and Continue reading