Cairns/At Sea

March 1-2
Cairns/At Sea

The ship tendered outside of Cairns on March 1st, the port in which my original plan was to try to get off the ship and go diving at the Great Barrier Reef. Well, after a few emails to dive companies and after finding out that we were both a tender ride and a bus ride outside of the city, the diving thing just didn’t look like it was going to work out. All the dive trips leave before 9am, which doesn’t do me any good when we don’t start the tendering process till 10:30. So I needed a new plan…
My search quickly came to an end when my friend Aaron told me he had an extra ticket to go on a rafting tour – lucky me! Aaron is a Broadcast Technician, meaning he often gets free tour tickets for him and a friend so that they can shoot video for the company. Today I was that friend.
It worked out where he didn’t even bring his video equipment and we simply loaded onto a bus like any other passenger heading out for an afternoon of rafting. There were about a dozen of us in total from the ship, kind of low for 2000 total passengers. Anyways, we drove up the mountain, were given the safety speech and an overview of the grade 3 river, helmets and life jackets were distributed and we set out.
My raft consisted of my friend and me, a couple from Addison IL, and another couple from California…the raft was promptly named “Team America”. Our guide was some Japanese dude with sketchy English, but he did a great job none the less. The river (Barron River) itself didn’t have any 7 meter water falls, but was much more technical than the NZ river, meaning more work navigating through the rocks, and as I see it, more dangerous. The entire trip lasted about 90 minutes traveling down a picture perfect river cradled in some valley running down the mountain. The water was the perfect temperature, meaning some of the time was spent off the raft swimming around till the next bunch of rapids approached, meanwhile we were assured that the salt-water Crocodiles never venture as far up the river as we were rafting…luckily that was true during this trip. I got some more photos from a photographer that traveled with the rafts, along with the picture Aaron took with his waterproof camera.
We landed the raft at a pub where we were given some drinks and potato wedges, which were great. We could also buy ice cream or drinks. The coolest thing about the outdoors pub, however, was this huge golden orb spider that had set a gigantic between the roof and a crossbeam. The web was the largest I’ve seen in the wild, and the spider was by far larger than anything I’ve ever seen roaming around. The best part was that the guy selling snacks said it was only average sized, as if it needed to get any bigger than the size of my hand. Anyways, I thought it was awesome, the women who saw him usually screamed.
We took the bus back to the ship, and not having any more time to get into Cairns, we just hopped on the tender. All in all, I’d have liked to see Cairns and would have loved to go diving, but would I trade that option for a free day of rafting, you betcha!
March 2nd was a sea day sailing to Papua New Guinea, and that’s all I have to say about that.