Australia and the Barrier
Reef 1
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viewed with 1024 x 768 Resolution
Our first
trip of the 2004 season was The Great Barrier Reef. It was really a great
trip, even for us less adventurous and non-swimmer folks like me.
There was enough diversity in the 9 day program so that us non-swimmers
had plenty to do without getting sunburned and wet. Shirley, however,
took full advantage of all the snorkeling opportunities, as did most of
the other 126 or so passengers.
We picked up the ship from
the town of Cairns which was a lovely town, very clean, and this time of
year, very hot and humid, as was the rest of the trip. And as we
went further north, it of course got more humid and hotter. But it
was tolerable and nobody seemed to mind it too much.
Our first
stop on the reef was Flinders Reef, and as you can see from the photo it
was a small sandy atoll or island maybe 100 yards wide and a half mile
long with a few birds nesting and an unmanned weather station. It
was a good place to get sunburned, and many of the folks did. We
were there for the whole day. Shirley loved it.
The following
day was Whitsunday Island, a good sandy beach which backed up to a rain
forest with birds and other small animals like this goanna lizard.
There were
some other people there as well. Some came by airplane and others
by small boats. Our boat is in the background, the Clipper Odyssey.
Here we are
getting organized, and then in the next picture everybody's looking at
a bird. The bird was very obliging, it sat there and posed for us
a long time. 
A
Blue-faced honeyeater.
A picture
taken from the dock leading to the resort on Whitsunday Island. The
next picture is the little resort on the Island where they served us tea,
coffee, and umbrellas. They had some small cabins where you could
stay the night, or more, if you had some way to get there.
Then in the
afternoon we visited Hamilton Island where we rented golf carts and did
a bit of bird watching. Lots of birds in Australia and most of them
were very colorful.
One of the
naturalist that went with us had a spotting scope, I just went up to it
and stuck the camera in the eye piece and snapped this; not to bad of a
picture, a Coucal pheasant.
The next
day was spent at Hardy Reef where some entrepreneurs had set up a reef
viewing platform or more precisely several platforms, one for scuba diving,
one for snorkling, and one for helicopters. Shirley took the helicopter
ride, here you can see the reef from the air. They also had a kind
of submarine, that didn't surmerge, where you could go into and look out
the windows, with the resultimg pictures below.
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jfeenstra@earthlink.net
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