August 10, 2018

Summer 2018 big trip - day 4

Tuesday 31st July

The Great Barrier Reef is a World Heritage Site that stretches for 1400 miles (or 2300km), is the largest coral reef system in the world (and so, in a way, the largest living thing on the planet), and lies off the coast of Queensland. Today we visited a very teeny part of it.

We drove to Port Douglas, north of Cairns, and had a very tasty lunch (I had softshell crab tacos) at a restaurant on the marina before catching the 1pm boat to the Low Isles on the Inner Reef for a half-day trip. After about half an hour a couple of small islands come into view, the larger one covered in trees (mangroves, which help keep the water clean) and the smaller one made of a white beach, trees, and a lighthouse. Very pretty.


The main boat anchored a little way off shore and we disembarked into a smaller boat which would serve as ferry to the island and glass-bottom-tour boat. The glass bottom boat tour was interesting, and the water was clear so we could see lots of different types of fish and corals. It's not as vibrantly coloured as the photoshopped pictures you see of the Great Barrier Reef, but there is some colour, and further out on the more untouched, unvisited parts of the outer reef the colours may be more pronounced. The boat skipper explained that if a coral reef is bleached by an increase in water temperature, that doesn't necessarily mean it's dead. There's a small window of time for it to recover - between six and ten weeks. So if, for example, in that window a storm or cyclone comes along and brings up some cold water from the deep, the too-warm-for-coral water will cool down a little and the coral can recover. If, however, the water temperature stays too warm for too long, the coral will die, and the entire ecosystem that depends on it will be affected. Which is why people are so concerned about global warming.

After the glass bottom boat tour we were given a tour of the island... basically we walked up the path to the middle of it. You can walk around the whole perimetre in about twenty minutes. There's a lighthouse with an osprey's nest on top, and a little house for the island's caretakers. The house is currently empty as they're looking for new ones; in the meantime the island is maintained by the tour boat staff and volunteers coming over from the mainland.

We spent the rest of the time snorkelling/swimming. I'd been here before on my previous visit with my grandparents in May/June 2012, during "stinger season", and we had to wear bright blue wetsuits that covered your whole body from ankle upwards, including your head, so that you were protected against jellyfish. They made one look ridiculous so thankfully this time we didn't have to wear those this time. We were given normal thigh-length wetsuits though, as protection against the sun.

After a couple of hours on the island we headed back to Port Douglas, where we arrived about 5pm and went for dinner at the same restaurant we had lunch at. I had papardelle with duck ragu, which was very tasty and filling. Then we drove the hour and a half back to my aunt's, pulling over for a few minutes at one point in the middle of nowhere to get out of the car and look up at the incredible display of stars. The sky was full of them, never seen so many, the Milky Way blazing across... I could have looked at that sky all night :)

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