Diving at the Great Barrier Reef and the first day of Port Douglas!

The last few days I’ve been doing my diving course, which was truly amazing. Diving is just unbelievably cool. At first the idea seemed kinda scary (after all, you breathe through a tube deep under water); but it’s a bit like an extreme rollercoaster: The first time I was quite nervous but after that I just wanted to go again straight away. The Great Barrier Reef is really beautiful, though it’s not even really the coral that’s all that exciting. 

The boat left... Rather early. Thank god for coffee.

A real surprise, for me anyways, is how much life there’s actually going on at the bottom of the ocean. When we were doing some exercises while sitting at the bottom, there were some fish that just came looking at the bubbles we were blowing out, there was a huge turtle we followed around for a while and just enormous schools of fish (more than 200 fish in them at least) all over the place. There were even sharks swimming in the area, although unfortunately I didn’t see any for myself (sharks sound scary, but they only eat fish of about 10cm large, apparently humans are just not on the menu). What we did see, though from the boat and not underwater, were whales! All together, there actually seems to be a lot more animal life going on at sea than there is on land. 

Some people throwing fish food in the sea, as to show how many there actually are

  

After 2 weeks of Cairns I’ve pretty much seen most things there though, and today I made the trip to Port Douglas! Josie, a woman I met at the hostel where I was staying in Cairns, offered me to couchsurf at her and Simons place for a couple days! Really, really cool. They’re both very chill people and I’m pretty sure the next couple days are going to be really great. 

Sunset at the pier

As for Port Douglas itself: It’s like a little paradise. I went into the city to explore for a bit, and walked around on the pier for a little bit when I got talking with an older woman, who asked me whether I liked fishing. As I’ve never fished before I told her so, and she asked me if I’d like to try. Basically we spent the next hour fishing together and we actually caught four fish!

Sue and me after some succesful fishing :)