The Great Barrier Reef- A Wonder of My World!

Well I haven't been able to blog for awhile so here's a little update of the last few days starting on Sunday!

Well Today was a fantastic one! I got to see one of the 7 Wonders of the World, The Great Barrier Reef. It was amazing. I started the day off at 6:30 to squishy fruit and cereal with warm milk again. We took a bus ride in the pouring rain to the dock at Cairns and hopped on the Passion Paradise II. We sat on the front of the boat and as the boat crashed against the waves the waves would hit the boat so hard that the entire front deck would get soaking wet! It was really choppy weather so a few people got sick but luckily my sea legs didn't give out on me and I didn't get sick. So right now in Australia its the season for really nasty jellyfish. There's the blue bottom jellyfish that has a sting that hurts for about half an hour but there's another kind that if you get stung you might have to end up in the hospital. So to prevent from being stung we had to wear legit blue stinger suits while we were in the water!

So after a two hour boat ride out to the interior reef of the Great Barrier Reef we stopped near a little sand island that was a bird sanctuary that could only be walked on in a little section because the rest of it was for the birds! So the boat gave us the option to be able to scuba dive for half an hour even if you weren't certified so it took me about half a second to say yes to that! So they got me all geared up with my flippers and oxygen tank, taught me a few hand motions to do underwater in case i started to freak out (which could have been very likely) and I jumped on in!

my scuba suit!!

I was with three other students and an instructor and it was incredible. I was able to touch some coral and other really sweet things. There was this certain type of coral that looked like spaghetti and whatever way the water would flow the spaghetti coral would flow with it. At one point I was completely surrounded by it and it was a wonderful experience to be in the midst of moving spaghetti in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef :) After scuba diving and snorkeling all day at one of the 7 wonders of the world we headed back but right into a huge storm where it started pouring on us so everyone was forced to sit inside the boat where it is very easy to get sea sick. Preferring to not throw up my lunch with a bunch of people I'm unfamiliar with, I decided to stand outside. It was very refreshing standing out in the rain on a boat off the coast of Australia :)

Once we returned to the hostel we packed up our things to get ready to leave the next morning and than just relaxed on Nanae's bed (a twin bed so 4 people squished onto it isn't actually that comfortable but we made it work). My next blog will be about the trip to Gold Coast, oh what an adventure that was...