second stop: cairns

No sooner than the moment at which we finally synced our circadian rhythms to the local time, Rob and I were up at 4 am the next morning to catch our flight to Cairns. I was groggy for the next 5 hours, but exuberant about the prospect of getting certified in scuba and taking my first dives as a fledgling scuba diver at the Great Barrier Reef. However, the excitement for this part of the trip began well before I started my scuba training. Rob and I managed to get an incredible deal at one of the—as the Aussies would say—swishest hotels in Cairns, the Shangri-La. (To give you some sense of the magnitude of the bargain, if this had been a Loehmann’s purchase, the receipt would have stated that we were saving over $250 a night.) Check out the view from our room of the Reef Fleet Terminal, the point from which all boats bound for the Great Barrier Reef depart.


And here's a photo of the lovely and spacious interior.


One other very exciting pre-scuba development in Cairns was meeting up with Stacy and Patty, friends from New York who were on a two-week long holiday in Australia. Stacy and Patty started their trip in Sydney and were in Cairns for a few days after camping out in Alice Springs. The four of us had dinner at Barnacle Bill's, a seafood restaurant located on the Esplanade.

Next up, day one of my 5-day scuba certification class!