I was thinking to myself this morning: unlike South Africa, this hasn’t been a trip of problems that end up working out well. Ha! Spoke too soon!
Let’s start with what worked as planned. We spent the morning on the white sand beaches of Whitsundays Island.
Then, after some lunch (calamari and chips with chicken salt for me), we were off for our reef dive!
There were three problems:
- I didn’t have enough weights, so couldn’t submerge. After getting new weights I swam fast to catch up to the group and ended up going through a lot of air (meaning I had to surface earlier than I would otherwise have)
- My GoPro’s battery was faulty! It went from 4hr record time to 2hr to 0 in less than a minute.
- Expectations were set a little too high. All those beautiful photos you see? They’re taken with the aid of powerful lights. In hindsight it’s obvious, but it took a while before I realized the muted colors I was seeing was exactly what I should be seeing.
The good news is that it was still a good dive. I’d definitely do it again. We saw so much coral and fish and coral and fish. The guide named most of what we saw, but there’s no way I am going to remember it.
Since I got no pictures of the dive, how about another one of the beach…
We’re having a BBQ tonight as a send off for the two of us who leave tomorrow. I fly to Sydney tomorrow at noon, then back home the following day.
Unless I move here… I mean, the houses I saw priced in a real estate window were only $2.5 million. Tha’s Australian dollars: so just under $2 million US.
Easy.
Travel 