Philipp's TravelBlog

Evie gave me lift to the Cairns airport as said before. I had to wait a little until I could check-in and used the time to use some of my remaining cap+ credit that was about to expire by calling family at home.

The flight from Cairns to Melbourne was easy and boring, about 3.5 hours. I killed some time by watching series on my laptop. Landed in Melbourne I got my backpack unharmed and left the airport. I gave my friend Andrew a ring that I’m ready to be picked up – when he drove just past me. Perfect timing! Bags in the trunk, me in the front. It was great to see him again!

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I have spent one week WWOOFing at Kanjini. This post will tell every single day and in the end you will see my photos from the week.

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The morning after my dive course I slept in until 10 am. Then I wrote an email to OzEx and another to Noosa Backpackers Resort to tell Janine that the travel package worked out nice and give her some feedback.

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Today I started my second WWOOFing stay, 50 minutes outside of Cairns. I am staying here until Thursday next week (July 28th) and will write one big blogpost about it that will be published when I leave.
For some reason my phone doesn’t work here, but the same simcard inside my laptop does. So if you want to contact me, it has to be online.

Tomorrow or so I will publish a blogpost about my last 2 days in Cairns. Just wanted to let you know that I’m alright and so far this place looks much better than my first WWOOFing stay.

When I was back at Gilligan’s, had checked in and had a long nice shower, I went down the bar to claim my $25 bar voucher.

The last time I asked (3 nights ago) I got a free beer and was told to come back on Monday night. Now it’s Tuesday, because I was on the Reef.

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We were woken up at 10 to 6 while it was still dark outside. 20 minutes later we got our dive site briefing. When the first sun beams crossed the horizon we were in the water and began our deep dive. Went down to 29 meters! I felt finde and nobody got “narced”.

http://www.narced.com/scuba/ gives a good explanation of being “narced”:

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Before I could crash the night before we were told how making today’s movie will happen. It was around 10 pm when I finally lay in my cabin. It was really warm so I slept in shorts only. It took me a while until I could sleep in because the engine was next room. And since a big ship like this needs constant power, the engine runs constantly.

Once I had fallen asleep I slept like a rock until the morning. We were woken up at 6 am. My cabin mate apologized for hitting my arm when he jumped down from his top bed to go for fresh air during the night. I had not noticed anything and couldn’t remember him doing so.

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I was picked up at 6:30 and and after picking up the rest of the gorup taken to the shop. After some unimportant stuff we were taken to the harbour where we entered the Reef Kist, the CDC’s day trip boat. It took us about 2 hours to get out to the reef. There were big waves and the boat was heavily rocking into all directions.

While most passengers were busy with thoroughly filling the brown paper bags with their breakfast I was having the time of my life 😀 smiling from one ear to the other I enjoyed the constant up and down.

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I was picked up in front of my hostel at 7:30 am. We picked up the rest of the group and went back to the classroom. We did 2 more chapters of theory (by watching the movies) then went into the pool. We repeated the skills from the day before, then continued with more surface skills: sharing air with our diving buddy, dragging him on the surface if he’s completely exhausted, giving him release from cramps, emergency ascents and more. We also practised to get out of our BC and back in while in the water.

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My alarm woke me at 7:30 AM. Got dressed, had breakfast and walked around 2 corners right into the Cairns Dive Centre at 8:30. When I had handed in my voucher and paid the reef tax ($20 per day) I went into the next room where I had to work through some papers. Then I had to give my credit card details as a deposit for my diving book. The diving school is working with SSI and I have booked a 5 day course to become a certified Open Water Diver.

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