Great Barrier Reef

After our time in New Zealand, we headed back to Australia. We spent a few days in Cairns checking out the Great Barrier Reef and Daintree Rainforest.

For the Great Barrier Reef, there are tons of companies that take you out to visit the reef. You can leave from Cairns or Port Douglas for most of these. Port Douglas is a shorter boat ride to get to the reefs but it is about an hour north of Cairns by car though, so we chose to stay right in Cairns within walking distance to the fleet terminal. This was only about a 15 minute taxi ride from the airport so it was very convenient.

We booked our tour through Viator but the tour operator was Ocean Freedom (https://cairns-tours.com/tour/ocean-freedom)- we cannot say enough amazing things about the crew! Would definitely recommend them. I did have to laugh a little bit about the warning you had to read before heading out. You can do snorkeling or diving – since neither of us are dive certified, we just snorkeled. They provided all the equipment – including lycra “stinger” suits (it was “stinger”/jellyfish season and in keeping with all the animals in Australia that can kill you, we appreciated the stinger suits!). They were also very handy for covering up – I didn’t have a swim shirt and burn very easily so these came in handy.

We were on the boat for around 90 minutes to get out to the first stop. In total we got to spend several hours in the water across 2 spots.

They also had a glass bottom boat that you could go on (which we did). And they also offered us an option for a longer swim – they took us a little way out on the glass bottom boat then we swam back as a group with one of the crew as a guide and got to see some pretty cool stuff When you look at the video in a bit and see a camera near the bottom filming a turtle – that was the guide offering to take the GoPro down for us and get a better shot. Which was much appreciated as neither of us were experienced at all with free dives.

Chris had 2 GoPros with him on the trip so we each took one with us to video. After Chris went through hours of those videos, I compiled some of our favorites. One thing to note is that the coral looks brown-ish. That’s because color is a reflection of light and the light can only get down so far (even with the pretty clear water we had). When you see brighter colors on professional videos – they have lights they take down with them.

(Note: I was having trouble intermittently with getting this video to work – I assume due its size. If the video below isn’t working for you, try this link instead: https://youtu.be/xrSuJZFVbUE)

We saw lots of fish and several turtles but only one small ray (not the greatest photo but this was in a somewhat deeper area and they hang out on the bottom).