Hello everyone!

Yesterday morning we woke up and found ourselves a library where we could blog for free. Afterwards we went shopping, needed some food for the upcoming days and also went by the chemist to buy some Kwell (so I wouldn't get seasick today). Of course we had to get some beer as well and top off the diesel in our campervan.

We had put everything in the fridge and started driving off to the town of 1770. Not a long drive from Agnes Water (about 5-10 minutes) and it wasn't a very big town either. We did see the Captain Cook monument, and booked a cruise to Lady Musgrave Island.

Back to Agnes Water for some lunch, some really really big cheap lunch. We both ordered the calamari but we got a lot more than we had anticipated. It was delicious though, so we didn't mind of course!

After arriving back at the caravan park we parked our campervan again and went out to sea. Our caravan park is literally next to the beach, it's not more than 20 meters away. And the water was a lot warmer than in Adelaide, I couldn't believe it. The waves were also a lot bigger, we went under quite a few times. Too bad we didn't have body boards with us, it would've been a great ride along the waves.

We started barbecuing when night had already set in (they don't know about daylight saving time here apparently..), which was around 6 pm. Cooked up everything we had bought in the stores and ate a very small part of it since we were still full of our big lunch.

This morning we had to get up really early, there was a bus who would bring us to the cruise, and it came by our caravan park at 8 am. It brought us to the town of 1770 where we boarded the cruise to Lady Musgrave Island. It was a very rough and long ride, high waves and constant shaking but the Kwell pills worked wonders (for me at least, some other passengers weren't so lucky..).
We arrived at a pontoon, a floating platform within the lagoon, where we got off and were handed our snorkel equipment. We snorkelled around for an hour or so trying to see as much of the Great Barrier Reef there before lunch was served. We had a fantastic buffet lunch (better than I had expected) and afterwards it was my time to put on a wetsuit because I had signed up for diving as well!

I was having doubts though, since I had been snorkelling around for an hour already and thought I had seen about everything of the reef that we could find there, but I was wrong. I'm glad I went through with it, because it was simply amazing. The fish weren't scared of you at all and came really close. You could also see the reef from up close.

In the meantime John went on a semi-submarine boat, which had a large compartment below which you could go into and see through the bottom of the boat. After we were both done we met up again and took the small boat towards the island itself.

It was a weird island, which reminded me of the island Jack Sparrow got dropped off multiple times. Couldn't find any of the rum though, but the island really looked like it was untouched by humans. This wasn't the case of course, because you could even go camping there in some seasons (when the turtles aren't laying eggs, or the eggs aren't hatching).

Still an amazing experience and I'm glad we went there. Well worth the long journey by boat, and I sincerely dislike boats.. The trip back seemed to go a lot smoother, probably because we were carried along by the waves this time. We also had some more room in the bus back to the caravan park and now it's dark already and not even 7 o clock yet, but time for some barbecued goodies. Tomorrow we'll be going to Elisabeth, see you there!

Jeremy (written on 17-03-2012)

P.S. Fixed the camera again, but still without internet, so again, you will receive news from a few days back.