Cairns & Great Barrier Reef - Aussie Adventure Part 4

Life List Achievement #53 was snorkeling or diving in the Great Barrier Reef, and I was so excited for this focal point of our trip to Australia.  We had attempted scuba certification back in Arizona in the spring, but due to illness, neither of us were able to complete the certification before moving.  I was anxious that we wouldn't be able to enjoy the Great Barrier Reef just by snorkeling, but it turned out, I needn't worry! 

This being such an important part of the trip, I had done a bit of research, and had selected Silverswift for our tour, because it seemed to be one of the faster boats, thus allowing us to see more of the Great Barrier Reef in a single day.  They had scuba and snorkeling options at three different stops along the Outer Reef, plus food for the day.  The weather was beautiful the day we went out, and we hung out on the front of the boat enjoying the wind and the views.  We were provided wet suits, snorkels and masks, and they even had prescription masks, which Jaiman and I took advantage of and were really glad we did so.  On our first trip out, we saw a giant sea turtle, large clams and anemone fish.  The next two stops we also saw large clams and anemone fish as well.  The coral and the fish were so close to us, I couldn't even imagine diving much, since we could see it all from the surface.  Sure there were deeper parts, but I definitely didn't feel like I was missing out by snorkeling.  Lunch was a buffet that was nothing spectacular, but sufficiently good and fulfilling.  On the last stop, there was a guided snorkeling tour during which our guide dove down and covered up the part of the clam that made it sense a predator, and it would close up in reaction.  He also told us about some of the other creatures and critters.  Jaiman and I pretty much maxed out our time at each of the three stops, taking in as much of the beauty as we could - it was really beyond description.  I think the only thing I would have done differently would be to bring my own dry snorkel, because from time to time the snorkel would accidentally go under water and I'd suck seawater, not the end of the world but a dry snorkel is just a little bit better. 

After our two concluded and we were shuttled back to our hotel, we walked around a bit, looking for dinner and Pokemon, and actually found a Corsola which we hadn't anticipated catching in Australia.  We ended up catching two during our time in Cairns, and would have loved to catch more, but were happy with our catches. Just outside the McDonald's was a group of young boys apparently from an Aboriginal tribe performing some of their dances and songs for tips.  We watched them for a bit and tipped them before moving on.  Later, we'd see an Aborginal show that was very much the same dances, so it appeared they were legit.  There was also a fire dancer performance going on, but it was actually kind of silly, so we moved on quickly from that. 

At the time I was booking our trip, I wasn't sure if we'd end up scuba diving or snorkeling, so I had left an extra day after the Great Barrier Reef tour before flying in case we did scuba.  However, that was months prior, and I could barely remember what the next thing on the itinerary was without looking.  Jaiman and I were using TripIt, as we normally do, to track our progress through our vacation.  The one downside to this app was that if you don't book something for a particular day, it just shows the next thing without showing that there was nothing booked on a particular day.  We'd been traveling so long I suppose that we weren't really aware of what day it was.  So, the next thing on our itinerary was a flight to Sydney, so the next morning we packed all our things and tried to check out.  The front desk attendant informed us that we still had another night, and then it dawned on me that I had booked the extra day.  Feeling foolish, we headed back upstairs to figure out what to do with the extra time in Cairns.  On the suggestion of a couple we had brunched with in Melbourne, we used the extra day to visit the rain forest, specifically the Kuranda Village. 

By the time we were up and ready to go, we had apparently missed the train into Kuranda, so I decided we should take an Uber.  Our Uber driver was an absolute delight, and I honestly would have been more than happy to have him just drive us around all day.  He took us up into the rain forest and dropped us off in the Kuranda Village.  We weren't quite sure what it was we wanted to do, but we got our bearings and figured we'd catch the train back to Cairns later that day, and with that, we were on our way to wander the wildlife park of Kuranda.While cuddling a koala had not been on my list of things I had to do, the opportunity presented itself at Kuranda, and I decided it was a great touristy thing to do.  However, it wasn't quite time to hold the koalas when we arrived, so we went to a little wallaby enclosure and fed the wallabies by hand, which was adorable.  Then we went back up to get in line for the koala cuddles, and got our picture taken holding a koala named Yoshi.  We walked around some more, visiting Bird World where all sorts of exotic birds flew around us in close proximity, even landing on Jaiman a couple times (but I was too slow with the camera to capture it). 
When we were happy with our time with the animals, we headed over to the other side of the village for the Aborigine experience at Rainforestation, where we saw a spear throwing demonstration, and a brief introduction to the didgeridoo to start.  Next, we learned how to throw a boomerang and each got at least one chance to try it out with supervision.  Finally, we were ushered into an outdoor theater where they put on a show for us, demonstrating their dances.  With that complete, we caught the shuttle to the train station and boarded the scenic railway that brought us over the mountain and back to Cairns, with one stop for a photo opp overlooking a huge valley and waterfall.  Cairns, you delivered a dream come true, and so much more!  I will never forget my time spent there.  And then we were off to our final destination in Australia, Sydney, where one of the most awkward travel moments of my life awaited us…

Aussie Adventure - Intro

I've had some pretty awesome and extensive vacations in my life thus far, and feel very blessed to be able to say that.  But none of them compare to the amount of anticipation, planning, and preparation that went into my most recent trip to Australia.  I first developed this itinerary circa 2008 in anticipation of going in 2009.  Things fell through - mostly, my travel partner.  I re-upped it for 2010, and again, flakiness pushed it off.  2011 didn't happen.  Neither did 2012.  Years passed and I began to feel more anxious about it.  Finally, in 2016, I decided that 2017 would be the year, come hell or high water.  Not too long after, my company announced it was moving our headquarters across the country, and Jaiman and I had a tough decision to make about our lives, let alone my much anticipated Australia trip.  As you probably know if you know me or have read my other blog posts, we took the relo package and moved, but I did not want that to postpone my Australia trip.  Moving from Arizona to Connecticut meant traveling farther to Australia, and it was a little challenging to justify given that we have so much we can do and explore around our new home on the East Coast, but I was determined. 

With the decision to move settled in early December, I suggested to Jaiman that we needed to minimize our physical belongings and that maybe Christmas presents should focus on experiences rather than things.  We had already begun a list of things we wanted to do in Arizona before we moved away, so that gave us some direction.  But also knowing that I wanted to scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef, Jaiman gave me an awesome gift of scuba diving lessons and certification.  Unfortunately, we were both a little sick when we had initially scheduled the class, and again for the makeup class, and so although we attempted to get through it, we ended up not completing the certification.  We discussed the possibility of trying again once in CT, but ultimately decided to simply snorkel the Great Barrier Reef instead. 

Actually, that ended up working out better than I expected, and our snorkeling trip was absolutely amazing.  The only thing I would have done differently was bring our own snorkels because we had the ones that close up when you go under water, making it easier to do short dives as desired.  We had opted not to bring our own equipment in the spirit of packing as lightly as possible, given how much traveling we'd be doing and wanting to minimize our luggage and the exposure to losing things, but just bringing snorkels wouldn't have been too much of a stretch in hindsight. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let's go back to the plan.  My initial itinerary, almost a decade before, had us hiking across the Outback for 3 days from Alice Springs to Ayer's Rock as the second thing to do; the first thing was a tour Kangaroo Island leaving from Adelaide.  My thought process was put something easy as the first thing, since we'd be tired from the initial trip over, and then put the hardest thing next so we knock it out early in our vacation and can coast the rest of the way.  Then we'd head to Melbourne and Cairns and finish with Sydney.  The two primary objectives were from my Life List, to snorkel/scuba the Great Barrier Reef and see a show at Sydney Opera House (#53 and #132, respectively).  As I started to finalize the details of the trip for 2017, I decided that it seemed to complex to deal with suitcases if we were trying to hike from Alice Springs to Ayer's Rock, and that I also probably wasn't going to be in shape to hike for three days straight, nor did that seem like a great use of vacation time.  So I ended up modifying that plan to simply visit Ayer's Rock - a great decision in hindsight!  The only other changes I considered were to add Nullarbor Links - a 100+ mile golf course that is also on my Life List, but determined to take several days - and a stop in Brisbane because of our MOS Burger obsession from Japan and theme parks.  In the end, we decided that those two stops could wait for another trip.  So we'd go to Adelaide, Ayer's Rock, Melbourne, Cairns and Sydney - hitting all but one state of Australia, and certainly a good mix of activities with some of the best highlights of the country. 

You know how sometimes the universe seems to be working either against a certain cause of yours or for it?  Well, despite the move across the country, I had some pretty funny little signs pushing me towards Australia as the trip neared.  First, my manager had hired a new teammate that was from Melbourne.  She was awesome, and I loved her instantly.  Her accent alone was mesmerizing - like, I could honestly listen to her all day.  It quickly came up that we'd be going to Australia soon, and before I even knew her a week, she had invited us to a housewarming party at her apartment in NYC.  There, we got to try our first tastes of some Australian staples like meat pies and sausage rolls, and met a number of her friends who were also from Australia.  All indications were that we'd love Australia.  A couple weeks later, I was actually in the middle of a book that was primarily about a woman with mental illness, but seemingly at random there was a whole chapter dedicated to a trip to Australia that had me laughing so hard I cried and again made me even more excited to go.  I learned from that book that certain parts of Australia outlaw holding koalas, but that they were stinky nasty creatures anyways.  Not that that was a big deal to me either way, I just wanted to see kangaroos and koalas, really, that was my biggest concern regarding the unique land animals of Australia.  Little did I know, I do much more than that! 

I'd been subscribed to the Sydney Opera House's events email for the decade I'd been planning a trip to Australia.  Honestly - it seems a bit crazy now, but that's how long this trip has been on mental burden on me.  So I knew from plenty of experience that shows didn't really get announced a year ahead of time, so it was hard in 2016 to plan what show we'd be going to.  I continued waiting and checking to see if anything good came up, and in the spring of 2017, a show did pop up that I thought was great and that Jaiman would really enjoy.  So I decided, again minimizing physical things as gifts, to give the tickets to Jaiman as an anniversary present.  We'd be going to see Postmodern Jukebox at the Sydney Opera House! 

With that date set, I was finally able to work out the rest of the itinerary around it, and I started booking hotels.  Since some of the excursions would pick up from certain hotels, I made sure to book the hotels based on those excursion pick ups - most of the hotels I booked were through Travelocity and had free cancellation, so I knew I could change plans with no problem if needed.  The one exception was Ayer's Rock - where the hotel I wanted wasn’t on Travelocity.  Here's a travel tip from me to you - I like booking on Travelocity for a number of reasons.  First, I've had great luck working with them if something happens and I have to cancel or change my bookings (even when its within the window; ref moving to CT and having my flight get cancelled and therefore I had to change my rental car and cancel my hotel the day of - Travelocity was great).  Second, I can pay with PayPal credit which is awesome for three reasons - PayPal credit doesn't show up on a credit report so it doesn't look like you have high balances of debt; you get 6 months no interest on all purchases over $50 which hotels obviously fall into, and I get my passive income through PayPal, so I can literally pay off my hotel expenditures with my passive income over time with no interest (…and since I don't include my passive income in my budget, this feels like I'm traveling for free!)  The other big reason I like Travelocity is because of the free cancellation policy on so many hotels, and I know from experience the cancellation is really easy to do online.  Also, when I've done comparative shopping, I've found that Travelocity almost always has the best price, and it's nice to have all or most of my bookings in one place.  Granted, I usually send my itineraries to TripIt and organize everything there as well, but it's nice to be able to double check in Travelocity, because TripIt doesn't update automatically when plans change. 

The main excursion for Adelaide was going to be the tour to Kangaroo Island.  But given that it was on the first leg of the trip, I decided to hold off on actually booking it until I was confident we'd actually get there on the right date.  So what I did was put the info in my TripIt itinerary, cleared labeled as NOT BOOKED so that I would remember to book it once we were well on our way and/or actually there.  This worked out just fine for us.  I did book the snorkeling excursion leaving from Cairns, since I figured there was no way I wouldn't make it to that.  I booked through Silverswift, advertising that it had one of the faster boats and therefore could get us out to see more of the GBR in a single day trip.  Many websites advise that you do overnight stays on boats to see the most of GBR.  That may be fine for another trip, but I really wanted to get out there and back.  At Ayer's Rock, I booked a camel tour, which seemed much more exotic in the description than what it ended up being, but it was still pretty fun.  To be fair, it was actually way less brutal than I anticipated, and although a bit gimicky, was a really pleasant way to see Ayer's Rock.  My only real complaint is that we didn't get very close to Ayer's Rock, so we still felt obligated to go out to rock afterwards on a different and pricier tour.  Had I known that, I may not have booked the camel tour at all, but in the end, I'm glad I did.  For Sydney, I tried to book a kayak tour through the harbor, but they didn't have tours on the dates that we were there.  We thought about doing the Bridge Climb, but postponed the decision.  In Melbourne, I had looked into a brewery tour, and but we also postponed booking until we were there.  For all the tentative plans, I simply put them into our itineraries as NOT BOOKED so that I knew what I was thinking but that we'd need to book them. 

As is often the case, I had opened up the invitation to others to come with us to Australia, and while there was some reluctant interest, no commitments happened, so it was just Jaiman and I along for this adventure again, but I was perfectly happy with that.  I sought advice about the best way to get to the airport from one of my other new teammates who had been local much longer, and she said the best way by far was to take an Uber.  Neither Jaiman or I had used Uber before, but were open to the idea.  If this trip did nothing else, it certainly converted me to the likes of Uber!  Honestly, all our Uber drivers and their nice cars blew away my preconceived assumptions and expectations of the service.  The only little hitch we had was, well, a failure on our part to think through everything to be honest.  I hadn't researched what visas were needed to get to Australia, and I guess I assumed someone would have told us if we needed such a thing.  So when we went to check in to our flight at the airport, we got this "Do not Board" message and the people at the counter couldn't tell us why, simply that something was wrong with our tickets and we'd have to wait until 9 am to sort it out, at which time our first flight would be well on its way to LA.  Frustrated, we sat down to the side and tried to figure it out.  After about 15 minutes of nothing useful, the manager came out and said he had figured out what was wrong - our tickets were fine but we needed what's called an ETA, which is Australia's visa system.  He said it would take 15 minutes to a few hours to get, but that's what was holding up our check in.  We quickly looked up ETA and started the application processes on each of our phones, and were able to get approval in minutes thankfully.  When we were certain we were clear, we got up and attempted to check in again and it worked.  Whew!  We barely managed to get our luggage checked in an hour before the flight, got through security with no issues and got on our plane.  

We were off for the trip of a lifetime!  First stop: Adelaide!