Cairns and Green Island

After my field trip, I had a night at home to do laundry and pack again to go off for the rest of my spring break. I flew up north to Cairns to meet my mom who came out for a couple weeks which was really cool. It was really good to see her, it had been about 6 months since I have seen any of my family and was definitely great that she could get time off work and come hang out over here for awhile. I got in at night and we didn't do very much because we had to get up early to go white water rafting the next day. The bus picked us up in the morning and we went to the Tully river that is a couple hours south and had an awesome time rafting the river. There are a lot lot lot of Japanese tourists in Cairns, so many of the guides are from Japan as well, and we got one of them named Yoshi, who kindof spoke English, which made it an interesting and probably more exciting trip, as you were sometimes not sure what he was instructing you to do. He was really enthusiastic though, and the other people in our boat were cool, there were some Germans and a couple from Dubai. We got to swim some rapids which was a lot of fun and they did a lot of tricks with the different rapids like doing 180s down the white water and flooding the raft. It was a sweet trip. They dropped us back off at Cairns that night and we got dinner at a sushi train place, it was like one of the sushi boat places, but on a train. Very awesome.

The next day we got up and took the ferry over to Green Island out on the great barrier reef. We stayed over there for 2 nights and it was great. You could snorkel whenever you wanted, and we got up early both mornings and went out before breakfast and got to see some awesome stuff like fish and turtles and sharks. They even fed the fish every afternoon off the jetty and tons of them would come and freak out over the fish food. One day we swam around the whole island and went to some places that were comepletely empty of people. My mom saw two shovelnose rays that freaked her out a bit, and we saw a ton of sea cucumbers too that are always good for entertainment. They look like deformed penises and when you pick them up they squirt out liquid from one side, what a ridiculous animal. We also got to go out to the outer reef on a boat that drove out about an hour to a platform in a part of the ocean where you couldn't see any land in any direction. It was really cool, you could snorkel off the platform or go in a semi-sub or even take a helicpoter flight over the reef. We snorkeled the whole time and had a good lunch there, and then snorkeled some more. I got a cool sunburn all over my back, it was pretty sunny out and the water wasn't even cold. I am really glad we were up there when it wasn't stinger season, because you can just go swimming anywhere without worrying about jellyfish or having to wear the 'stinger suits'. It was really neat, we saw a lot of fish and some sharks even, it was really beautiful.

They also had a crocodile farm/zoo thing on the island that was a bit random but it was neat. They had a bunch of crocs over there and we went over for one of the feedings where the guy got the big 5 meter croc to jump out of the water for a chicken. It was pretty impressive. We also got to hold a small crocodile that had its mouth taped shut. I was happy about that because they will aparently just go for anything and would take a bite out of you without really thinking at all. It's true though because a crocodile has the brain about the size of one of our fingernails, and everything it does is based on instinct and it doesn't really ever think about anything. Pretty weird, but it makes them predictable I guess.

The rest of the time we just chilled out at the beach and walked around the island. They had a free drinks hour at 5 every night and we took advantage of the free mimosas! Was pretty cool, really nice place, and we had good weather most of the time. It poured rain really hard for a few minutes at a time or a lot at night, but we were definitely lucky and had sunny days most of the time.

Pix are: sargent major fish at the fish feeding, the outer reef, snorkeling, mom with sea cucumber, and a turtle