Day 0
Flight to Sydney
The Great Barrier Reef has been in decline for the past couple of decades. Wishing to see the reef, before it ceased to exist, led us to choose Australia as our 2019 vacation destination. There was one small catch: while we had done an ‘intro to scuba’ dive experience on our honeymoon, neither Todd nor I were certified scuba divers. In order to see more than just a bit of the reef we decided to become certified divers so we could spend several days diving from a liveaboard dive boat. We enrolled in a PADI Open Water diver certification class with the Float N’ Flag dive shop in Burlington, Ontario; and completed our in-class lessons and confined water dives in the weeks before of our trip. When we reached Australia, all we had to do was complete our open water checkout dives with an instructor on the liveaboard to complete our certification. We ended up doing 9 dives across 3 days/. The staff at both Float N’ Flag and Pro Dive Cairns were fantastic and we were very happy to be able to see a small bit of the natural wonder of the Great Barrier Reef before it was gone forever.
While scuba diving may have been the reason we chose Australia, it was only one part of our vacation. Australia is much too big a country to be able to see in one trip, so we decided to focus our time in a only a few locations. We spent a few days exploring Sydney, where we saw the harbour, the Taronga Zoo, climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and went dancing at one of Sydney’s nightclubs; we spent time around Cairns hiking through the lush forests of the Wooroonooran National Park and taking the train up to Kuranda, and finally we got to meet up with some extended relatives of Todd’s in Newcastle. It was an incredibly busy 2 weeks, but we really enjoyed the small glimpse we had of Australia and plan on returning to see more of it in the future.
