Cairns, The Great Barrier Reef and White Water Rafting!

Hi Again!

It's been a while since I've written because I was gone for 5 days on a trip to Cairns with Emily, Becca, Laura and Kate! The trip flew by way to fast, but we took advantage of every moment we were there!

The first day, we got to our hostel, the Nomads Serpent Hostel, and got keys to our room. It smelled pretty funky and there were bunk beds with questionable sheets on them...but we got what we paid for! We dropped our stuff off and went right off to the Esplanade which was about a 5 minute ride in the hostel's free bus service.

When we got to town, we found a Lagoon that serves as a public pool for anybody who wants to go for a swim. It had sand to lay on grass to play on, and water to swim in...what more could we ask for! Here's a picture of Me, Emily, Laura and Becca in the Lagoon:

We spent the first two days relaxing by the Lagoon, exploring the town, and eating way too much food! At night, we went to a bar called RhinoBar and they had different deals every night (for example power hours where it was $8 all you can drink for an hour...very dangerous!) The shuttle service from our hostel switched its drop off point from the esplanade to RhinoBar starting at 7pm and went until 3am. Here's a picture of one of our nights out at the bar:

Wednesday was our big day out on the reef, so we got up super early and boarded our boat at about 8:00am. The weather was looking pretty cloudy and gross in the morning, but as soon as we anchored at our first reef destination, the sun came out and never went back behind a cloud for the rest of the day! We went to two different reefs both of which were unbelievable. I opted out of scuba diving because it was pretty expensive and it was definitely a good idea because I saw SO much snorkeling!! I bought a case for my camera so that I could take it in the water with me and got some pretty incredible pictures of the reef...obviously they aren't as good as seeing the real thing...but here are some of the highlights of my underwater adventure:

This was a blue fish that I followed around the reef for a while...it would come up really close to my goggles and then swim away...I fell a little bit in love and took a few too many pictures of it so I'll just share this one with you :)

This was the biggest fish I came across! His name was Wally (the scuba instructors named him that) and he is the friendliest fish in the sea and he let me pet him (it was a little bit gross but really cool!!

And this of course is the coolest fish in the sea! :)

And that was my great barrier reef adventure!! We spend most of our time in the water swimming with the fish and the rest of our time up on the deck of the boat sunbathing. I put on lots of sunscreen and figured I was being as careful as possible...what I didn't think about was that while I was snorkeling, my butt was floating above water...and boyyyy did I get a sunburn!!! It was three days ago and it's still hard for me to sit down!

Which leads me to our next adventure...white water rafting...where I had to sit on my extremely sunburned butt for 4 hours!! As painful as that was, it was definitely worth it. We decided to do a half day on the Barron River instead of the Tully River which has the bigger rapids but only does full day trips. Since we were all pretty worn out from our reef day, we figured a half day would be plenty. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures from this trip, but Emily, Becca, Laura and I were all in a raft together with another guy, Danny from England and our guide "Andrew the Mandrew." We had an amazing time...almost lost Emily in a big rapid, and all made it out alive which was the main goal of the day!

All in all, our vacation from our vacation was a blast and went by way too quickly! We flew back to Sydney this morning and the first thing I did was go to the gym and do a hard core workout because I ate a little too much and exercised a little too little!! But I guess that's what vacations are all about! Well, that's about it for now...I hope you are all doing well and enjoying the beautiful weather...oh wait... :)

LOVE LOVE LOVE

Lauren