We flew to Cairns, Australia for a chance to get up close and personal with the Great Barrier Reef. Cairns was a really lovely town with a beautiful waterfront “esplanade” (or promenade, as we would probably call it) and an amazing public pool. However, most visitors come to visit the Great Barrier Reef and this was of course the highlight of our visit!

We signed up to visit the reef with Silverswift, one of the companies that offers diving tours. At $230 USD per person this was no doubt our most expensive activity to date (on this trip and probably ever) but we decided we had to check it out. When will we be able to see this again?!

We got on the boat around 8am and began the dive briefing while we rode about an hour to some outer parts of the reef. We learned about safety in the area and got some details on the wildlife we might be able to see. I was really scared of encountering some of the killer box jellyfish that Australia is known for but thankfully the dive instructors didn’t seem phased at all by them and we got these full-body “stinger suits” just in case.

We did three dives over the course of the day at different sites on the reef and had a blast! We saw some very colorful fish but the real highlight of the day was the fantastic coral. There were so many different shapes and colors and it was much more expansive than anything we have ever seen. We had hoped to see some turtles or reef sharks that are known to be in the the area but even without those sightings we thought this was the best diving we’ve done to date.

When knew diving the Great Barrier Reef would be a really special experience and we wanted to be able to capture it using the GoPro. However, we’ve been disappointed in our scuba diving photos to date. If you look back at our dives from Taiwan or Sri Lanka, the photos are all really green and blue-tinted and it’s hard to get the true colors of the underwater world. We did a little bit of research and learned that you need to get a red filter to bring out the real colors in the photos. Check out these two pictures of the same coral, one with the filter and the other without:

The photos with the filter capture the colors we actually saw underwater. They were incredible! We wish we had learned this trick sooner but were so glad we figured it out in time to get some photos of this world wonder!

We had an amazing day diving and this will be a hard Valentine’s Day date to beat! We will try but it might take awhile…

As has become tradition, we celebrated our successful dive with some great pizza and walked around downtown Cairns before calling it a night.  Cairns was a very cool little city with relaxed vibes and we wished we had some more time to explore the surrounding national park.  We were able to cross off an awesome experience from our bucket list but as is often the case, we left hoping to come back to see even more. Off to Sydney!