Not a bird of paradise, but..

On this trip to Oz, we have two objectives. 1. Fulfil a lifelong dream of Flo to dive at the Great Barrier Reef. 2. Explore parts of Australia that we haven't previously visited, like South Australia, Tasmania, and Melbourne.

For objective 1, we have been in Northern, North Queensland, for 12 days. Of course, for the objective, we don't need so long, but we add in visits to the Daintree Rainforest, the Tablelands, and Magnetic Island. See the photos of the forests and the beaches.

Flo, Lennox, Lola, and Nora did 4 dives on two days trips. On the 2nd trip, Oscar and I joined and went snorkelling. The latter was a great day out for all. The diving wasn't all great due to a rather nasty dive master on the 1st trip and poor visibility on the first dive of day 2, but it was as I understand it still worth it. The strange part is that the Reef is in better shape than the news would have you believe, however a bigger and unreported issue is that the number of fish on the Reef is much lower than when I visited last time, and certainly much lower than Raja Ampat and Permuteran in Indonesia. Quite why nobody seems to know.

Talking of Indonesia, we did not see any birds of paradise in western Papua, but here, just south of Cairns, we saw two Cassowaries. Not very pretty, but certainly exotic and extremely rare, given that the total population in the wild is only 2000. So, bird lovers, you can be very jealous 😀.Read more