Last adventures in australia (Cairns)

Still in Cairns I have miles left on my greyhound pass, so I call the always friendly girls at Greyhound and as I have so often done and proceed to enquire which great barrier reef trip I could do? As always, I just go "YEAH that one! I want that one! That one sounds amazing" at some random point.  

The Great Barrier Reef! (Diving)
Wake up at 6, go to the boat (big catemeran), thought there'd be 10 people on it, there's 70, cool. The trip includes a free 10 minute dive! Awesome. All suited up and it the water we do the security checks (being able to-re-apply your mask underwater, put your mouth piece back in, etc), the time we're done with that, the dives over. If you wanna go on an actual dive, it's 70 dollars extra! Nice marketing, you sneaky aussie bastards. I do it, and am not dissappointed. It's far more amazing than I thought, it feels really natural and I feel like I belong under water, instead of just being a visitor (snorkling). I'm a natural at it, I've always enjoyed being in the water.

I have a female diving instructor. When she gave me the briefing she struck me as unusually robotic (she probably did the briefing thousands of times). Under water however, she strikes me as, unusually attractive! In hind sight it must have had something to do with her being my leader, me having to trust her, the way her hair flowed in the water and me linking the overall experience to her. Once out of the water however, the magic was sadly again lost :(

Lie on the deck and read, the sun proceeds to burn through my factor 60 sunblock suncream! So I head inside.

Back at the hostel I'm peacefully eating my chicken and asparagus, when some crazy lady comes up to me and starts talking to me with her face an inch away from mine. Me :"What are you doing?" her: "I'm just talking to you" me: "you're in my personal space" her: ignores the comment and keeps on talking. In the end she leaves, but comes back and I have to go get people from the reception to have her removed.

Met a really nice Belgian girl while I was out the other night, she was leaving the next day though.

Birthday!
My birthday was a little quiter than other ones. Had some awesome cheesecake and donuts though. Other than that, I read and replied to my birthday mail and had a lengthy webcam call with my sister and dad, which was great. They showed me around the house with the webcam and for a second there, I was back home, mmmmm.

Fishing!
Takes me 200 e-mails and just as many phone calls, but I finally manage to book my fishing tour. At 6 (again!) I'm picked up by Terry, he's my guide. Have an interesting conversdation with him as we drive to the Daintree river. He's a typical traditional aussie complete with border-line rascist view of the aboriginals, but with a kind heart and positive outlook on life. To make a loooong story short, it is a windy day, fish are not happy when it's windy, so it's a shit day of fishing. We fish for 7 hours total and we're after the barramundi's, but whatever we try, they're simply not home, or not biting. Terry compliments my casting, saying that I have a natural ability and that if this would've been a good day, I would've caught a dozen of them by then at least. Somewhere in the middle of the day I get a good strike from a barramundi, but sadly, he or she escapes :( Just as though it was a cheap hollywood script; when we're about to give up, I FINALLY hook up with a barramundi! Beautiful fish, take a picture of it and return it to its home. The picture I'm scetching you here is overdramatic though, because I left out the fact, that besides that barramundi I also caught 6 barracuda's and 3 trevali's (pound for pound the strongest fish in the sea) and Terry caught a Tarpon and a bunch of other stuff! So in the end it was a lot of hard work and it was too bad that my only day of fishing had to be a tough one. All is relative though and the barramundi that I DID end up catching of course felt all the more special.  

Since there is not a lot of things that I can attach myself to around here, I notice that when I do, it tends to be more so than usual. In this light I must say that this was a special day and it was great hanging out with a real aussie in the form of my guide Terry.