Cairns

Hi Everyone!

Okay, so we're in Cairns (pronounced Cannns by the Aussies) for a few days of beach, reef and rainforest. Our hotel isn't that great, but the area we're staying in is pretty sweet.  It's a little secluded beach community called Trinity Beach and it has it's own beach that's about a mile long with rocky outcroppings on either end to block off the beach from other nearby beaches.  There's a number of really nice restaurants within walking distance and the beach itself is pretty awesome (except that we're kind of worried about jellyfish, which are starting to get in season).

So far, we've gone and hung out on the beach, (there's Caitlin sitting on the rocks looking at our little beach town) and today we went snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef.  One thing I didn't know is that the reef is actually broken up into a zillion little reefs, I kind of always actually thought it was just one massive 200 mile long reef.

So we went to one of the Frankland islands, a deserted island group a few miles offshore from the mouth of the Mulgrove river.  It was absolutely gorgeous.  The weather was perfect and we had the island to ourselves (and 55 of our closest strangers) with our little piece of the reef in our secluded cove.

So we got to snorkel and take pictures with our underwater camera of all the fish in the reef, which were so close that you could literally reach out and touch them (I think we both accidentally kicked fish with our big flippers, oops!).  We got to explore the island, which felt very 'Lost'-ish, so that was fun.  And, during one of our sun breaks, we got to see a couple sea turtles up close and personal!  We didn't have a chance to grab our snorkeling gear, so we just got to see them from 4 feet away on shore, but hopefully our pictures of them turn out.

In the meantime, it was pretty much a perfect day on the Coral Sea.  We got a little sunburned, but hey, what can you do, we saw the Great Barrier Reef and it was definitely awesome!  Sorry for the lack of pictures, we took a bunch, but our internet connection here is slow enough that it makes posting pictures take forever.  Hopefully it'll be faster when we get back to Sydney and we can post all the pictures from the stuff we've been doing. . .

We'll keep posting on our exploits though, so see you all later,
Scott