Adelaide, Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef
We always thought of Australia as being a familiar place of relief and relaxation after 11 months of chaos and hard travelling through Asia. A rest in other words, something easy. But as ever, our imagination ran away with itself and we constructed a plan that was none of those things. What we ended up with was a list of things we wanted to do last time we were here but didn’t have the time for. Wine tours round South Australia, a road trip down the Great Ocean Road, the delights of Melbourne (maybe even the Grand Prix and an AFL game), a 2-week lap of Tasmania in a campervan, a night at the Sydney Opera House and bucolic walks in the Blue Mountains. Easy…
As we did our research we realised our Great Ocean Road trip fell over the Labour Day weekend in Victoria, so we couldn’t find accommodation for love nor money. Actually we could for money, but the costs were astronomical and far too much for our budget. Why don’t we go up to Queensland and see the Great Barrier Reef instead? Of course. Another bucket list item, but one we’d previously discounted as it’s completely the wrong time of year (cyclone season), but we’d get lucky wouldn’t we? Of course we would. Let’s chance it, it’ll be fine….
Asia, as ever, managed to squeeze its last bit of discomfort out of us as we flew overnight from Kuala Lumpur, via Bali, to Adelaide, squashed into miniscule seats that hardly reclined. We were like a sea of nodding donkeys as people dropped-off, falling heads jerking back upwards then slowly drooping again. Amusing though it was, little sleep was achieved.
Adelaide in the few hours of sunshine it allowed us
Adelaide Botanical Gardens
We’d chosen Adelaide as our entry point to the country as it offered an abundance of wineries and the prospect of beautiful sunny days (the most of any city at this time of year), so we were a little deflated by the chilly, pouring rain we met on arrival. At least the welcome from the natives was warm. Aussies, as a rule, are lovely people and our first encounters only strengthened that belief. A kindly gent walked us to the bus stop at the airport and the lady bus driver actually diverted the bus from its usual route so we could get nearer our lodgings, and therefore less wet. The art consultant owner of our AirBnB decided to come to the cafe we found (we had a bacon sandwich – sheer joy!) to meet us and take us to our digs, an absolutely beautiful studio flat with sumptuous fittings, parquet flooring and artwork from Australia & Papua New Guinea dotting the walls.
Sadly we missed out on the cancelled Writers Festival due to be held over our stay in Adelaide (the organisers excluded a Palestinian writer for her recently expressed views, causing every other invited writer to cancel on them in protest – a pretty spectacular own goal in this very PC minded country), but there was still the Adelaide Fringe festival in full swing to keep us entertained. We saw that a production of Hamlet was on. Great, but not very ‘fringe’, we thought. Who’s doing it? A company called ‘Shit-Faced Shakespeare’. This we just had to see. They’re actually a UK troupe basing themselves on the premise that at least one cast member has to be blinding drunk just before the performance starts, and the rest of the cast have to improvise around the chaos. High-brow it was not, but hilarious it most certainly was. Hamlet himself was the selected inebriate that night. We got little actual Shakespeare (though he did manage to miraculously churn out most of his ‘To Be or Not To Be’ soliloquy) but more in the way of drunken lewdness and debauchery and lots of beer and vodka swilling through the performance. Shakespeare himself would have loved it…..
We kept the alcohol theme going the next day with a trip out to the McLaren Vale wine region. The state of South Australia is famous for its wineries, probably in the main for the Barossa Valley, but the McLaren Vale offered a slightly more relaxed wine adventure, one with less pretension and more ‘pizzazz’. We opted for the easy way of doing it and joined a minibus tour that went past each of the vale wineries every hour, allowing us to jump out, sample some wines and jump back on an hour later. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult to keep to the timetable and on several occasions we had to be encouraged to finish our drinking. All in the best possible humour though – we met some lovely hosts and hostesses, passionate about their wines and their rather quirky wineries, but happy for us to enjoy our time with them without pressure or pretense. Equally the other folk on our bus, all very much our age or older, were lovely. One was the daughter of an original £10 Pom. Some joined us in our tastings. One, a retired pathologist from Sydney called Mark, had also been enjoying the Fringe. We encouraged him to see Hamlet. He, in turn, encouraged us to see a show called ‘Nun Slut’, in which a semi-naked sister wordlessly performed stunts involving a hula-hoop swirling around her bare and copious breasts. I was all for seeing it, but Helen, strangely, was slightly less keen.
“So tell me again what technique the nun used…”
We ended up enjoying Adelaide a lot, despite the mainly rubbish weather. It’s a friendly, pleasant little city with a nice little art gallery and interesting immigration museum, not to mention an expansive botanical garden that looked great when the sun finally did grace us with its presence on our last day there. Not sure we felt quite the same way about Cairns though. As the main gateway to the Great Barrier Reef we expected a prosperous town with decent hotels and restaurants. There are a few, but accommodation is mainly based on ‘not so cheap, not so cheerful’ backpacker dives. Equally there were many rough sleepers about and random, shouting drunks roaming the streets at all hours. Coupled with the newly developed seafront boardwalk area, where more affluent joggers bounced up and down at dawn and dusk, the city felt somewhat schizophrenic.
As we arrived at our hotel, bleary eyed after a 3:30am get up to make our flight, we got an email informing us that the 3 day liveaboard Reef snorkelling trip we’d booked for the next day had been cancelled. Tropical Low U29 was to blame, a small, but very disruptive cyclone system that was still wreaking havoc on the coast just north of us.* The seas, it seems, were just too rough for us to go. We were offered a chance to join another trip several days later, in anticipation of the storm passing on by then, though that meant cutting our time to 2 days due to pre-booked flights. We opted to chance it again, the alternative being to leave without getting onto the Reef at all.
* We’d originally intended to stay in a lovely looking town called Port Douglas just 70km further up the Queensland coast. Glad we didn’t. The town was pretty badly flooded and the ferries taking trips up into the ancient Daintree Forest (another place we’d intended to go) were all washed out to sea…
Hot & humid Cairns
Within a few hours of us arriving the rains started. We were on the outer edges of the storm so were spared the winds and torrential rain, but the atmosphere remained tropically hot and steamy despite the constant heavy downpour. Not enough to cause any damage, but too much to be out and enjoying yourself. It made the town seem even more depressing. So a few largely indoor days were endured, though at least with a dashed excursion to the city Koala sanctuary where we watched 3 of the cute little beasties engage in madcap antics such as sleeping, waking up, yawning, eating eucalyptus leaves, yawning and sleeping. Another city art gallery too. Pretty good to be honest, but only an hour’s diversion..
Keep watching & I’ll turn to the right
Look, I did it…..
The day before the rescheduled trip the rains had mainly cleared up and we took a bus out to a forest on the slopes of Mount Whitfield just north of the city, eagerly anticipating a chance to stretch our legs and see a little of Queensland’s famous tropical woodlands. The atmosphere was as humid as we’ve encountered for a while and within minutes we were both drenched from head to foot. Easy paths soon turned to difficult, narrow trails as we ascended up through dark and magnificent woods, our way made harder by many slippery roots and rocks. Mosquitos were everywhere and were biting. Thin, trailing vines full of tiny sharp spikes scratched our legs and arms and tore small holes in our clothes. We realised we’d not brought enough water and our bottles quickly ran dry. Fortunately we found a trickle of a stream and replenished our supplies. It seemed a primaeval place at times – not for the fainthearted or unprepared. Then to our surprise as we crested the summit, the oppressive atmosphere of the forest gave way to a clearing in which a mobile phone mast, a flagpole and large generator were incongruously plonked. Our well deserved lunch was spent listening to the hum of electricity and clanking of rope against metal, though we also met a retired Aussie bloke up there who joined us for a picnic lunch and spirits soon lifted again. The entire walk was only about 8 kilometres in total, but we were completely knackered by the end.
Mount Whitfield forest
Mount Whitfield forest
Hungry Pademelon
Mount Whitfield forest
Mount Whitfield forest
The first day of our Great Barrier Reef trip eventually came around. We were last to be picked up in a minibus and were pleasantly surprised to see a range of ages in the folks already there (anticipating we’d stand out as the fogeys in a crowd of young kids). All were transported to the dock to board the Sea Quest, a catamaran that takes people out on day-trips to dive or snorkel and then ferries those on liveaboards to the larger Ocean Quest catamaran, which is permanently moored on the outer reef. Although the main effect of the Tropical Low had gone, the sea was still very lively with the after effects. The boat slammed up and down in the water like a violent rollercoaster and several people were sick, but having survived the 2 hours voyage out we at last moored-up near the Norman Reef and got ready for our first snorkel.
The routine on these things seems a little chaotic, especially at first when the process is new. It was still jellyfish season, so thin ‘stinger’ suits were needed for all. These are a little like wetsuits, but slightly easy to put on (all relative though – it was still bloody painful on my damaged shoulder). Scuba divers and snorkelers alike (a split of about 50/50) have to find a suit that fits, then gather other gear from various large buckets strewn around. About 40 of us searching, jostling, dressing etc on a pretty small boat. It took quite a while to sort out.
Divers safely in, us snorkelers followed. To say the sea was a bit choppy would be a huge understatement. Meter high swells made us bob up and down alarmingly and snorkels needed evacuating with almost every breath. I drank 3 gulps of seawater in the first few minutes. Helen was wearing a full face mask she’d bought in Kuala Lumpur, but the snorkel was way too short. You can’t blow water out of these things very easily, so she needed to surface all the time and after a few minutes she’d already had enough. We hadn’t even reached the reef yet. As Helen swam back to the boat, I carried on and made it to the first corals and tried to ignore the discomfort (feeling sick, struggling to breathe and increasingly in pain with blisters forming on my toes from the crappy flippers I had). The pay-off though, was marvellous. Within a few minutes I’d seen a 5 foot nurse shark (quite rare in these waters it turns out), and an amazing assortment of brightly-coloured fish of varying shapes and sizes. The corals themselves were also quite remarkable. An incredible array of colours and designs, some looking like brains or pancakes, some oscillating gently in the current, some vivid pink, some vibrant blue. Unlike some areas of the Great Barrier Reef where the corals have been bleached, the outer reef has remained largely intact, though there were depressingly large areas where corals had been destroyed. I managed to get a few photos, remarkable in itself as the current and waves were throwing me around to the point where I could never be still.
We did another 2 snorkels that day, both on the Saxon Reef, both pretty exhausting but always magnificent nonetheless. On one dive the waves calmed somewhat for about an hour and I was lucky enough to see giant clams, a startled and panicky cuttlefish, a small white tipped shark gliding beneath me and a pair of delightful and inseparable white & yellow ocean angelfish. Helen did get to see the reef too, via a private ‘lift’ on what the staff liked to call ‘Aqua Uber’.
As dusk descended into evening, a small contingent of divers took to the waters armed with torches and some serious bravado for a short night dive to see the abundant shark life that is especially active at this time. On board, the staff threw fish food over the stern and we watched under floodlights as huge gray reef sharks menaced a school of large Red Bass and Giant Trevallys, biding their time, then wriggling sharply to accelerate towards likely victims. Alas for them, none were lucky on this occasion.
The pictures here might suggest a different story, but it was a difficult day. But we kept our cool and were rewarded for our efforts. Life on board the Ocean Quest was a little easier. The other liveaboarders were friendly and we enjoyed their company (mainly Americans, Canadians, Brits and a couple from Austria), but the boat was full and it made for pretty cramped conditions. We’d thought we’d been a little short-changed when we got to berth in the cabin in the centre, a smaller affair than the rest and with no windows. Turned out to be the opposite though. The conditions became even choppier as the evening turned to night, and it seems we were the only ones to get a decent night’s sleep, protected as we were from the worst of the movement experienced in the cabins around the edges. There were a lot of weary looking people milling around in the morning.
Day 2, though, was not a great deal of fun. If we’d thought Day 1 was hard, it was nothing compared to the conditions we got the next day as we moved again to dive on the Hastings Reef. Hopes for calmer seas were dashed as we awoke to metre and a half swells with foaming white tops. Helen wisely decided not to bother at all. I gave it a go, but having swallowed a stomach full of sea-water was starting to be sick and getting incredibly dizzy. As overly dramatic as it sounds, at one point I considered that I might even drown (I was not alone there as I found out later). I’m not the strongest swimmer in the world so cut my losses and got out, along with several others. Some hardier souls stayed in, but were restricted to a miniscule area of reef where the visibility was just about OK. All left early and were disappointed with what they saw. Some of the staff told us this was the absolute limit for snorkelling. I think most of us thought that line had already been crossed to be honest.
We returned to land and stayed in a cheap backpacker place for a few hours before another ungodly wake-up for our early morning flight to Melbourne. To be honest, we couldn’t help but question whether it was all worth it. Just about, we concluded. We’ve been treated to some wonderful experiences like this before, most notably our 7-day trip around the Galapagos Islands on my 50th birthday where the weather was wonderful, the snorkeling was spectacular, the wildlife was phenomenal and the boat, food, staff, etc were all top notch. If that was an exclusive, ‘artisan’ experience, the Reef trip was more of a ‘mass-produced’ offering. Not bad and with some very special moments for sure, but not quite in the same league. It also somehow felt like we’d just ticked a box on the bucket list, but at least we’d gotten to do it at all when our percentage chances of achieving anything were pretty low. Happy for that at least and essentially very glad we’ve done it. We just won’t be doing it again…
On to Melbourne!
Simon (10th March 2026)
Well i hope you will be giving snorkeling a miss for a while after your experiences. Lets hope that the rest of Australia is worth your time & money. I am sure it will be. Take care. XX ❣️
Totally get how you can feel seasick IN the sea. Not gun at all.
The pictures are fab and the narration is top notch as usual.
Hope the shoulder is improving, take care both x x