After thousands of kilometers in the hot desert, we finally made it to the west coast about 2 weeks ago. We stayed in Broome for a couple days, then headed down south to a place called Exmouth, which a couple of Swiss recommended to us. This is the first place since about Brisbane when we can bathe in the ocean, finally no stingers in the water! It was getting kind of frustrating seeing all those beautiful beaches and not being able to go in the waves.

Too bad we’re a bit too early here. In a few weeks whale sharks (the biggest fish on earth) will arrive in the area and spend the fall and winter months. Also in about 3 weeks there will be the coral spawning (about 10 days after the March full moon) on the reef, which is for sure an amazing sight. I’m not complaining though, the marine national park surrounding the peninsula where we are includes some 265 km of coral reef….enough to socialize with lots of fish. And boy did we ever see cool ones yesterday! We dove at an old navy pier where we saw a few dolphins swim by before we even entered the water. And then we saw big cods, schools of yellow striped fish, morray eels, green stars, a stone fish, black sailfin catfish, funny dudes with globule eyes, a huge whatever-his-name-fish having his teeth cleaned out by small vacuum fish and even white tip sharks! There were no corals but so many fish, it was really amazing. Tomorrow the plan is to go snorkeling on the west side of the peninsula (open to sea), it should be very different but for sure beautiful.

Talking about diving, we never said much about the great barrier reef, nor about Cairns.

First thing, we had an unusual experience in Cairns: we slept in a real bed for a whole week! A friend of my brother-in-law whom I met shortly about 10 years ago lives there, he and his wife were so nice as to invite us to stay at their place for a week. They also showed us the city, took us for a BBQ downtown, to the beach, to the National Park behind their house for a hike in the rainforest and a swim in a cool creek, etc. We had a really good time with them and did enjoy being in a house for a few days. Then we headed north to Port Douglas where we re-read the whole dive theory book and made a refresher in a pool with an instructor before going to the reef the next day. Being off-season has advantages: the boat was only half full and we were alone with the instructor to dive. And guess what? I met Nemo!! And also his dad and Dora (or is it Dory?). There were so many colourful fish, it was like being in a fish tank at the pet shop, but a million times better! The sky was cloudy on that day so I guess we missed the colours on the reef, but the shapes and sizes and movements of the corals made up for it. Marcel had imagined that the great barrier reef is one huge barrier or corals stuck together, so he was kind of surprised it’s actually loads of corals close to each other, but not necessarily attached. It’s more like “hills” or banks of corals very close together. There are also huge mussels (40cm) that clam up if you move some water in front of them, and funny anemones and nudibranches (sort of colourful water slug), and and and…. Needless to say we loved the dives! After that we went up to Cape Tribulation and the Daintree, and once back in Cairns we figured we’d go diving again on a sunny day, in the hope of seeing some colour on the reef. Again it was a superb diving day, but since there had been some cyclones at sea the visibility was not the best, so no colours. Still it was worth it, you can’t get enough of this amazing marine life.