Whitsundays, Magnetic Island, Cairns and Great Barrier Reef

Whitsundays

After the Fraser Island trip, the next stop was Airlie beach for a three days boat trip at the Whitsunday Islands, this is a truly spectacular and beautiful place! The boat I went with are named Apollo and it offered a free dive included in trip, more about this later. Anyhow, below is a few pictures from the islands. None of them do it justice though, this might be the most beautiful place I've ever been.

 

 

As I said we also got a dive, and I went for another one as well + some snorkeling. This is a part of the great barrier reef, the corals were nice, the visibility quite shit. Saw some cool fishes etc, and of course a turtle all of us followed around for quite a while. Wonder what the turtle were thinking.

Back in Airlie beach after the boat trip we went to the local waterfalls, quite a nice spot for some bathing and jumping of cliffs if you dare!

Beneath the "giant" waterfall!

 Also spotted these in the local store, what?

Magnetic Island

Magnetic island was the next stop, apparently quite a beautiful place, I just stayed at the cool hostel and a bit in the surroundings. Didn't rent a car or anything like that. Anyhow the first thing I see upon my arrival is a dive shop on site, and I'm like yeah, might as well go for a dive.Then I saw the sign below.

 

Yeah, no diving for those two days.

From the local lookout point.

 Made a new friend as well! The "wildlife" is quite domesticated. This possum even had a baby, and got a free pasta meal!

 Some company in the bathroom.

Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef

So yeah, stayed in Cairns for a few days and did nothing except chilling out at the local lagoon, and meeting friends from Fraser island and Whitsundays. All I waited for was basically to get aboard the 5 day live aboard diving boat at the great barrier reef. That trip was awesome, twelve dives in total, Nitrox certification, three night dives, one shark dive, one fluoro dive where you get a UV-torch and a yellow filter for the mask. This makes the reef light up in all sorts of amazing colors, it can't really be described and should be seen with your own eye. I got a video, but it's quite shit, and as always it is a hassle to get them uploaded so yeah... we'll see if I can be bothered :p  I'm just going to leave you with a lot of pictures from the trip. All the watermarked images are taken by the on board photographer, the ones without are mine. Again, his pictures does the reef some justice, mine, not so much. This is something you have to experience for yourself!

 Water snake

 Nemo!

 WE also did some cod feeding, this was a HUGE dude.

 Yeah, more Nemo! Surrounded by a lot of glass fish.

 If you open this picture in fullsize you can see a million of small glass fish surrounding the whole reef. The whole pillar was "wrapped" in these small fishes.

 

 Here's the huge cod again!

This picture is taken while being towed behind a small boat, back to the main diving boat, this was just awesome! Felt like a NAVY Seal or something :)

And this is the peeps I went out with, ten crew, and ten of us, on a boat where there usually are 30 people + 10 crew. So we had it quite luxurious! Thanks for a great time guys!

Ps. this is my last day in Australia, I'm headed of to Fiji in like 13 hours, so a GREAT end to my travels here down under!