The Water Babies

After the major drive to Cairns, and the tiredness we have been feeling, today would have been a good day to have a nice lie-in and take it easy.

Unfortunately, the campsite we are staying on in Cairns has organised “activities”. These are usually delivered by local tour operators and businesses, obviously in an attempt that you will use their company later on in your stay. And it just so happened that today’s activity was a snorkelling lesson!

Apart from briefly playing with snorkel sets when we were children, neither of us had the faintest clue about how to snorkel. So, at 9am this morning, we went to the TV room on the campsite to learn! And as you would expect, out of a room of eight people, there was only us and a four year old girl who’d never slapped a face mask on in anger!

The lesson was done by a company called Reef Magic, and started off with a quick presentation video about the Great Barrier Reef. Coincidently, we had researched trips to the Great Barrier Reef from Cairns before we got here, and had already decided on using Reef Magic for this, so we had the luxury of knowing that any potential sales pitch would be “preaching to the converted”. After a fifteen minute presentation which featured heavily on “symbiotic relationships of marine life” and only briefly on our daily activity of “Nemo Finding”, we were off to the pool to put on a mask and snorkel and practice! And for anyone who’s seen my brother’s pictures on Facebook wearing a snorkelling mask, all I can say is that I make this look good!

Now, all my life I’ve been a water baby. Usually if I enter a pool or the sea, it usually takes an army of people to remove me from it. It’s no exaggeration to say that I could quite happily spend all my life in the water, until I shrivelled up to nothing. I have no fear of water, swimming, diving or any other water based activity. So it came as something of a shock when I put my head under the water for the first time and completely, totally and utterly lost my nerve! I don’t know if it was the shock of seeing under the water, or the chlorinated water rapidly filling my mask up, but I was not a happy bunny! Luckily though, it was explained to me that the water was coming into my mask because I’d not shaved for weeks and not through any mask defects so, although it didn’t resolve the leaking it did strangely calm me down and I was soon in full swing.

Mandy, on the other hand, has a much healthy fear of water. Maybe it’s down to the fact she can’t touch the bottom in paddling pools; who knows? So at first, she was a total lost cause and all thoughts of doing the Great Barrier Reef together started to disappear. Luckily though, the instructor (perhaps sensing losing potentially two customers), jumped into the pool fully clothed and slowly talked her through it. The end result was that by the end of the two hour lesson she was spending more time diving under the water and swimming like a dolphin than she was spending above water! The instructor even remarked to me whilst I was handing our masks back that he’d never seen such a complete and utter transformation! So Mandy, as well as being a Dwarf/ Umpah Lumpah/ Munchkin, etc is now also an honorary dolphin!

After having a rest for a couple of hours, we decided to take a quick drive into Cairns city centre.

Our first impressions of Cairns is that it seems like quite a nice place. More large town than city, there are some really good features like an artificial lagoon right on the seafront, which was packed full of sun worshippers and families.

We also got our first view of the Cairns Hilton, which at the end of next week we will spend our last two nights in Australia in!

So all in all, a very good day.

Only slightly ruined by the incessant dolphin noises and begging for fish from Mandy!