Queensland Trip - Great Barrier Reef

We had been waiting to swim near the Great Barrier Reef since we arrived in Australia on New Year's Day. We finally did it on August 30th! We almost missed out too...we arrived to the Adelaide airport on August 28th thinking we were going to fly out to Cairns, Queensland which is a city close to the Great Barrier Reef. Long story short (and leaving out a lot of poor customer service details), our flight had been cancelled that morning and we were crap out of luck with no flights getting us up there that same day. We worked for about 4 hours trying to get our flights, hotels and rental cars all one day later (maintaining our rewards points). We were worried that we would have to push our entire trip back to another month, but we worked it all out. After much frustration and poor customer service from the airlines, we finally flew to Cairns the next day. We certainly learned patience at that moment, but the airlines is still getting an unsatisfactory letter :)

Moving on to what you only care about...pictures of our visit to the Great Barrier Reef in Northern Queensland. We went on a day trip and arrived to a pontoon along the "Outer" Great Barrier Reef. We took a tour in the glass bottom boat to see the reef which was our first glimpse of unique looking fish.

Lunch was well...like eating in Australia. So we had a quick lunch and put our lycra suits on to snorkel (water was a little cold so the suits helped). Most people suggest to scuba dive, but we wouldn't have had time to get certified and dive as neither one of us have our certification already. Anyway, we still enjoyed it minus all of the salt water we ingested. We did see colorful fish, eels and a huge fish that looked like a shark but we were told it wasn't. I guarantee you we would have put our Michael Phelps flippers on to get back to the pontoon if the shark theory had been confirmed.


































Since we stayed at a resort in Port Douglas about an hour north of Cairns, we had to drive the rental car back to Cairns to fly out for our next destination in Brisbane, Queensland. Along the drive, there are a few nice beaches and scenic views. The landscape is beautiful with blue/green water lined up to green mountains. Very nice.













Very kind of the Queensland government to warn us about crocs!