There is one thing that scared me in Cairns. We arrived during the evening and went out to search for a restaurant. On our way to the esplanade we saw hundreds or thousands of bats flying all over while small helpless parrots were hiding in trees and making horrible noise. We still haven’t found out the reason why Cairn’s bats do not live in caves or in dark forests, but we saw them during the day as well, hanging in the trees. Weird!

I cannot say too much about Cairns, but it has a very nice artificial lagoon, pelicans and high UV. However, one thing is sure: it is the gate to an amazing place on earth, the Great Barrier Reef.

It was a Saturday morning, 8 am, when we boarded and departed for the reef snorkel and diving experience! Yes, that was a memorable day at 2 locations: Hasting Reef and Saxon Reef. The Bear went for 3 dives and the Zeb, myself, got confident with breathing under water and in love with diving. Yes, I will go for the open water certification as soon as we settle somewhere for few days.

We saw a lot of colored fish of all dimensions: clown fish (Nemo), reef shark, trumpet fish, moorish idol, crown thorn, honeycomb moray eel, Napoleon maori wrasse, blue spotted lagoon ray, green turtle and multi-colored corals. It was beautiful!

And…we met the first Romanians after almost 2 months of travel. They were coming from the United States. Ha ha!