Adventurous by nature

When we left the airport in Cairns, at the northern east coast of Australia, we almost dropped dead from the heat and, even more so, the humidity. Too long had we gotten used to the wonderful climate of a temperate summer, long were forgotten the Southeast Asian hot and steamy days (at least to our body temperature control system). Well, the tropics had us back.
We got to our hostel in Cairns, changed clothes and started exploring the little city. We didn't get far as we had to buy some general things and get ourselves checked in to a trip we were about to take. The climate, the very early start that day in Auckland and the slight time difference of 4 hours between NZ and Queensland did the rest. We ended up back in the hostel early for pizza, a game of pool and a shower before bed at 9 pm...

The next morning it was rise and shine early again as we were about to embark on our 3-day liveaboard diving cruise to the outer Great Barrier Reef. We went with the awesome guys from Pro Dive Cairns that made this trip a great and memorable experience. They picked us up at 6 am the first day, had us on the boat, enjoying a great tropical breakfast, by 7:30 am and readily briefed and all set up for the first dive at 11 am. The first dive was also our first dive without an instructor with us. It was an amazing and very liberating experience to explore a dive site on our own and to see that we are able to navigate through them well enough to see all the cool spots and make it back to the boat alive and well.

We had 4 dives on both the first and the second day and 3 more dives on the third. Highlights included diving with a crazy amount of huge turtles, diving with reef sharks by day and suddenly being surrounded by their bigger relatives from the deep sea on the night dives, seeing clownfish that are very rare in Australia (unlike in other places we dove at before),

Annelieses birthday cake

finding the funniest underwater snails, rays and huge schools of bumphead perrotfish. The colourful reef with all the great corals, anemones and the like is truly spectacular and makes the most perfect home for the similarly colourful tiny, funny, big, scary, spiky, interesting fish, crabs, jellyfish etc. that you could possibly think of. We even saw dolphins, that surely would have rescued us from the sharks if the need had been.
During the dives we were served awesome food, took naps on deck, sunbathed while looking out over the turquoise waters and slept in cosy  cabins. Oh those perfect days.
11 dives later, a happy, exhausted crowd got back on land, wishing to go back down immediately but also happy to just go take a nap in the next hammock. We went to pick up our new Campervan instead and thus our next adventure started right away.