Port Douglas

Our early morning flight and a bus ride with Steve, our bus driver who pointed out lots of interesting things while taking the crazy corners of the winding road, took us to the quaint little town of Port Douglas!

We spent our first day in Port Douglas exploring the town. We explored an little church on the beach called St. Mary's, and walked up to a lookout from which you can see a lovely view of the town. We meet a nice fellow fishing who suggested we go to sunset point, so we watched the sunset there. It was lovely - a couple was playing guitar and another group was slack lining between the palm trees.

After dinner, we returned to sunset point to watch the stars. They were phenomenal - there was no moon and Port Douglas is a long ways from the big city lights, so the milky way and the constellations (the few that we know) were bright and beautiful.

The next morning, we took a tour out to the great barrier reef! The ride out to the reef was beautiful - Jer and I sat on the front of the boat in the spray. It was almost a two hour trip to the reef, so after a bit, we got chilly and I was rather seasick. The first snorkling location that we stopped at was called beautiful mooring and it was beautiful. The fish and corals were fantastic colours and everything was shallow and easy to see. The tour we took had about 20ish people on board, so we had lots of space to explore the reef. Unfortunately, I got a little scrape from a coral there (don't worry mom! I hydrogen peroxided the cut, applied an antiseptic cream, and I'm keeping it clean). The corals look so soft and squishy, but they feel like shards of glass unfortunately.

After about an hour, the boat continued onto a second and completely different part of the coral. There were huge walls of coral and a tower of coral that protruded up 50m from the ocean floor. It looked like a beautiful castle of coral with a million kinds of brightly coloured fish swimming in and out of the coral walls. We made use of Andrew's gopro, but I don't think the video could possibly capture the feeling of swimming in the middle of a school of giant parrot fish or swimming over a coral table to see a deep drop-off with all kinds of fish popping out from under the ledge. It was amazing.

Next, we enjoyed a delicious lunch while Joanna, a lovely woman who is working on her PhD on sea turtles gave a talk about coral and conservation of the reef. And then we were at our last site of the day called turtle bay. It was or favourite of all the locations where the boat stopped. Giant towers of coral twisted up from the ocean floor making little paths like gorges that we swam through. The larger fish liked to hide in these gorges. Then I noticed a very smooth rock under me... with a head... It was a sea turtle! A few people in our group also spotted a shark, but I must admit, I would have been pretty nervous to see the shark myself. For the trip back, I was thoroughly zonked with gravol and I slept most of the way, sadly missing the fancy cheeses offered by the crew. But when I did get back to the hostel, I made myself lots of delicious crackers and cheese from our grocery run yesterday.

Jeremy and I cleaned up from the day, and walked downtown to the chemist (pharmacy) to buy the antiseptics. On our way back to the hostel, we watched the huge fruit bats (which I think are also called flying foxes)  from palm tree to palm tree as the sun set over the ocean. It was amazing to see in an eerie sort of way. They are actually the size of small foxes - but with bat wings.

Back at the hostel, I chatted with my roommates - who are all teachers!  And now it is time for bed :) goodnight!