Day 2 began at &am with a pickup at the hotel. We were moving up to Port Douglas (about 60 miles or so north) to go onto the Great Barrier Reef. Quicksilver tours had this unbelievably sexy catamaran to take us the twenty miles or so out to sea.
This took about an hour and the reef is highly visible from quite far away. Tea and cookies on board, with film to tell us about the reef and what we would be able to try out during our day there.
Looking back toward Port Douglas. The town is very beautiful and is , of course, a resort town. A bit of historical buildings left to look at and a lot of restaurants and rental condos abound. No buildings were higher than four floors so as not to mar the landscape. Our hotel was all white verandas and white lattice, fans in the rooms with fans on the balcony. This tells you how hot and sticky it must be in the summer. While we were there, the daytime highs were about 25-28.Here is the catamaran seen from the ocean platform of the tour company. The platform has everything on it except bathrooms (use the boat ones please!) We could snorkel, skin dive, walk around with a bell jar on our heads, ride in a semi submersible or go for a ride in a helicopter. I swam with a mask and went in the semi-submersible. I took an unbelievable amount of pictures during the day and it was hard to get it down to just a few.
This is in the viewing room they have at the platform. Everything is in a blue cast because of the thickness of the glass.
Here's a semi sub tootling around the reef.
The sun is brutal, especially at sea. We lived with sunscreen in our teeth we wore so much. I was very lucky in that I only got a bit of a burn on my chest one day after a swim.
The cat seen from the platform. The Australians are very careful to preserve their "Golden Egg". The cat had this crane arm on it to take cases of food out to the platform and cases of garbage back after a day. Nothing dropped in the ocean!
My ride in the semi-sub was great fun! We rode around a reef chunk and looked at everything. The pilot could navigate by sight as she was above the water. The coral formations were incredible and I saw things like sea turtles and zebra striped fish and well...a lot!
More of the reef. The glass for viewing was extremely thick and thus distorts the colours.
The snorkelling platform. Impossible to tell who is who for all the equipment one needed to wear to go in the water. The blue suit is to protect from scratches from the coral and jellyfish, The vests for the not so strong swimmers, fins for speed and facemask for viewing. The water was cool but not uncomfortable.
Day three was a free day. Boy! we needed that. We set ourselves a goal of going to a game preserve with a big part being "for the birds". They offered a tour called "Breakfast with the birds". Sounded like our kind of thing, so we got up early and set out to walk the 4 miles or so to the sanctuary. This is the main roadway into Port Douglas and we were told that they had planted 2,000 palms along it when it had been recently improved.
A lorikeet having a sip of apple juice. The breakfast was a big buffet with horrible coffee and middling food, but the birds were a hoot. The whole eating area was canopied and the shadows of the birds sitting on the outside were great. There were ibis and parrots, cranes, lorikeets and a myriad of other types of birds all flying around the dining area and landing (skidding) onto tables to steal scraps when they could. Not too sanitary I tell ya!
I saw my first kukeburras! They are a largish kingfisher style bird with a lot less picky menu than a kingfisher. Survival is everything!
This is a frogmouth. A frogmouth what, I don't know but they are all mouth. They were about the size of a small owl. When they were sleeping, they would tilt their heads back and look just like a big branch on the log they were sitting on.
The palm varieties just kept amazing me! The texture of the leaves is stiff like cardboard or harder. The coating is hard and waxy to help protect from moisture loss in the wilting sunshine. We gave up on walking all the way back from the breakfast because of the sun and took a bus.
Just a really nice view of the Port Douglas beach from a walk up a bluff.
Because it's winter, the sun did go down fairly early and as we headed south throughout the trip, the sun went down earlier and earlier. We did travel south well over 1500 miles!
The same view but higher up still!
We would be heading out the next day, for a Billie Tea tour. A quintissential Australian codger, in a 4 wheel thingy driving us up into the Daintree National Park for an educating morning in the rainforest.
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