Cairns
Day 1 – Dives 1-3
After a long day of travel yesterday, I was ready to do something peaceful and easy, you know, like enjoying fishes 18 meters below the surface of the ocean—a typical relaxing day. On our first dive, we saw some fish and coral. On our second dive, we saw some fish and coral. On our third dive, we saw- you guessed it – A Triggerfish, some fish, and coral.
Day 2 – Church and Relax
on Sunday, we went to a nice church with that megachurch feel, which was interesting; not bad, but not my favorite. After that, we decided to go home and rest and recuperate after our day of diving yesterday and our day of diving to come.
Day 3 Dives 4-6
Today we went diving in another spot on the great barrier reef. Repeating the same joke from two days ago would be redundant and annoying; here are the names of our dive sites, the depths, and the times for each.
Flynn reef – Tracy’s bommie
10:05 – 11:00 45 min
Depth 21.5
Flynn reef – Gordon’s mooring
11:45-12:40 52min
Depth 12.8
Rosco’s
2:05-3:53 42 minute
12.4 depth
Day 4 – Animals
Today we went to breakfast with the koalas, and it was awesome. Then we did a boat tour with the crocodiles, which was fantastic. After that, we wandered into a snake show where they were teaching about a python. Eventually, they put away the python and got out a brown-headed inland taipan. Now, for those who don’t know, the inland taipan is the most venomous snake in the world, and it has been said that one drop of its venom is enough to kill 100 adults. So, as you can imagine, being so close to such a snake was unnerving. After this experience, which was actually quite interesting, we left.
Sydney
Day 1 – History and Opera
On day 1 of being in Sydney, we went on a little tour about the history of Sydney, and a part of Sydney called the rocks. Why? Because initially, the people who were told to live there saw that it was rocky. Here is some of those people’s history.
The birth of Sydney
The first people to see Australia was the crew of the sailor and adventurer Capitan Cook. When he saw the land, he sailed into a little bay that looked very lush and green, and one of his sailors, a botanist, called it botany bay, which was contrary to Cook’s name, anchor bay. Cook liked his name better until someone spoke up and said that, ahem, anchor bay was stupid. So botany bay it was. Fast forward eight years and England was having prison problems. See, at that point in time, the sentence in England for theft of any kind was death. So the sentence for anyone who stole a loaf of bread or a morsel of rotten cheese to keep their family alive was sentenced to death.
As the population grew, so did poverty and starvation, and thus theft increased. Soon, England had to set up floating prisons in their harbors. These floating prisons were gross and inhumane, with thousands of people crammed together inside tiny rooms. It soon became a security concern too. If these prisons were to be broken out of, thousands of enraged and starving people would be swarming ashore to take vengeance. Why didn’t they follow through on their law and kill everyone? There is a couple of reasons. One is that it is expensive to kill them all: the method at that time was hanging, and hanging takes forever, and it is costly to pay everyone: the hanger, the officiator, the military if the victim escaped, the jail guard. Another is that there were too many of them. People were coming in daily, and there were already those there. One last reason is that they were a major part of the workforce. Many were unskilled and had no useful trade, but they could be made to work as porters, footmen, cooks, maids, chimney sweeps, etc. but there were also many skilled folk: blacksmiths, seamstresses, carpenters, farmers, clerks, who were very useful around the world. Soon the government came up with a solution: send them to the new world, A.K.A. America. over 50,000 people were got rid of this way, but, come the revolutionary war, the U.S.A. stopped allowing Britain to send their convicts over. in steps the botanist for cooks ship. Remember him? he was the guy that named botany bay. He steps in and says they can send the convicts to botany bay. Fast forward ten years later, they built a settlement called the rocks, and near where the opera house is today, there was a not-convict settlement. Fast forward to today, you have the same Sydney, built by convicts, improved by technology, and still beautiful, with the iconic Sydney Opera House.
Opera
Speaking of the iconic Sydney opera house, that night, we went there and saw Don Giovani, an opera by Mozart. It was very interesting, but a little hard to follow due to the fact that the subtitles were hard to see and it was in Italian. But it was a good opera.
Day 2
On Friday morning, we stayed in the house because my little brother was feeling sick. In the afternoon, we left and explored a bit of the place we walked to yesterday on our history tour. After this, we had a dinner of beautiful kangaroo burgers. If your wondering, it tastes like a normal burger, just the meat is more crumbly. We met up with my brother, who was feeling much better after eating something, and went to our main destination for the evening: climbing the Sydney bridge. It was beautiful. It was sunset, and the light was perfect. We thought it was going to rain, but the wind changed as we were getting a little sprinkled on, and the storm missed us.
Day 3
Our last activity of the entire trip: a kayaking tour of some of the Sydney harbor. We went to three beaches, one of them ironically named quarantine beach.