The Reef Trip

On Wednesday we headed out to the Great Barrier Reef with a boat that our hosts recommended, the Calypso (their stock photo is above, they threw it in "free" with the picture of us in scuba gear that we bought from their photographer). One of our hosts (Chris of Chris & Mandy) is a dive inspector, so we figured they would probably have pretty good recommendations :->

Neither of us are Scuba certified, but we decided to do an intro dive, which has you go down to 10 meters with an instructor. It was certainly an interesting experience, but I'm not sure it sold us on Scuba diving, there was a lot of equipment, and I don't think either of us relaxed much underwater, although I'm sure that comes with practice.

The third stop of the day was by far the best in terms of clarity of water and variety and quantity of fish. This was our first try using an underwater digital camera that we picked up before coming on the trip, it is quite small and does not even look waterproof but overall it worked pretty well. Lisa particularly liked the picture of me with the Giant Clam, which I'm sure was only 12 feet down but felt more like 20 :->

































Yesterday (Thursday) we went to a bird "Habitat" so get ready to look at way too many bird pictures in a couple of days. Today we did a sugar factory tour (Sugar is the only industry besides toursim in the town that we are staying in), and went on a croc watching boat ride, pictures to follow in a couple of days.

P.S. Sorry about any formatting errors. This site apparently has some not so user-friendly issues, but we're doing our best. I did have to get Matt an ice cream cone to keep him from hitting the poor computer (fortunately the shop has both ice cream and internet). :)