Day 19: Cairns (PADI certified!)

Hey guys, its been awhile since my last post (whoops! I'll eventually get around to posting the whole lot) and I've been a busy bee.

In a nutshell, I travelled down from Sydney to Melbourne in a rental car with Christina and Anna, spent some time down and around Melbourne checking out the local wildlife (this too!), tasting some wine, and cruising down the Great Ocean Road. Thats where the spectacular 12 apostles (rocks, not the people) are located, but they're too far out of the way so we didn't see them...

Next a flight brought us up to Cairns (NE coast, as warm as it'll be while I'm here) where I spent some time with Christina and Anna seeing the Daintree Rainforest both by day and night, as well as going for breakfast with the birds in Port Douglas, seeing the Tjapukai cultural park (where we got to throw spears at kangaroos, and throw boomerangs in a game of catch 'n keep). Also, we went out on the reef itself to Michaelmas Cay on a large tourist catamaran to snorkel (and dive in Christina's case)

Next, I split up with the girls and have been spending time on my own since last tuesday enrolled in a scuba diving course. I'm now a proud PADI certified Open Water Diver :) The course I took involved two days training in the pool and classroom, followed by a 3-day, 2-night liveabord cruise on a scuba boat. Unfortunately the poor weather forced us to miss a day and night out on the reef, but we still managed to get in 6 dives on the reef, its crazy going down there and breathing, swimming with the fish, turtles (yes I saw them), stingrays (well, stingray) and whatever else is down there (no sharks damnit). I'll definitely being diving whenever I can while I'm here and probably do some back in Canada when I return.

Well, thats it for now, I'll be going down to the Whitsunday islands by bus (11 hours, can't wait) tonight to take a ride on the Dreamcatcher for 2 days/nights. Then its off to Fraser island to drive around and explore the worlds biggest sand island before heading down to the Gold Coast or Byron Bay to learn to surf :) whew!