Day 20 – Cairns & Great Barrier Reef
Early start as we need to be over at the Cairns wharf at 8:30. Justine goes to the office to get the tickets and we queue up to board the large dual hull boat
….. I think in hindsight this is where the day just started to go pear shaped for me….. We seemed to be queueing for a lot longer than should be necessary. As we get closer to the head of the queue, I can see they are stopping each group and taking photo, “which will be available for purchase at the gift shop at the end of the tour”. It then gets better when the crew at the boarding ramp ask if we have sea sick medication. As we board over the loudspeaker they announce “we’ve got high winds and large swell today, if you have travel medication take it now”, well I don’t need to be told twice, so scoff a couple of the kid’s tablets we have. Then to see all the crew don latex gloves and walk around with a stack of sickbags, just adds to the confidence.
After we get out of the relatively protected Cairns harbour, we have swells of about 2m and this vessel is being tossed around a bit too much for my liking. This along with diesel fumes I start to get a headache and it is around this time I have a sense of humour failure.
The boat is full of Chinese tourists and I can tell you they are falling like flies. The crew have 100’s of sick bags, but I’m not sure there will be enough. OK I exaggerate (but only just, on the back deck where we were, they filled a garbage bin with full bags, and again I’ll save you the photo).
Shall we just say, this is not what is shown in the brochures!
As someone who suffers from motion sickness, I’m surprised that I didn’t go out in sympathy.
Anyway after an hour of this pleasure cruise we arrive at the Pontoon. From this point thing where pretty well as expected. At the reef the swell was a lot less, Justine and Liam go for a snorkel, although Liam has had enough pretty quickly. This gives Justine the time to do a proper swim and she is rewarded with some time swimming alongside a turtle, a real highlight that would have been fantastic to see, fortunately she had the gopro, so we have some pretty amazing video. The kids occupy themselves with the underwater viewing area, and you can see the fish from the sides of the pontoons.
Liam has some fun with the water slide that dumps you in the ocean. Me, I’m enjoying the surrounds, but not really enjoying myself, if that makes any sense.
The trip back is rough, but nowhere near as bad as the way out, by the time we arrive back in Cairns we are probably close to an hour behind schedule and it is pretty much dark. So it is a quick drive back to the caravan park for dinner and to start packing up. As we were packing up it started to rain pretty heavily, not wanting to pack away wet stuff we’re done in record time.
Oh what a bummer, when you had been looking forward to it too.
Glad the train trip to Kuranda was a fine day. Bob and I were just about washed town the hill in the train the day we went. No view for the torrential rain. Have a good one today.