After exploring the city, I went on an excursion above the rainforest. They have a gondola that takes you above the rainforest and up to a city called Kuranda. It was such a beautiful trip! It was so cool to go through the canopy and see all kinds of animals and then look back and see the ocean once I was above the trees. Unreal!
In Kuranda, I went to a butterfly sanctuary and a bird sanctuary and saw some of the most beautiful and unique animals I have ever seen. I was amazing to say the least! They also had a small "zoo" where I got to see crocodiles, kangaroos, wombats, crazy poisonous snakes (which you totally walk through their enclosure and they are curled up in trees right above you!!!! SCARY!) and koalas. I was ridiculously excited because I could hold a koala there. They have a tendency to be a little mean and grumpy so there aren't many that you can hold. This is Sienna. She was half asleep which I guess is good for a koala. If someone woke me up, I wouldn't be as content as she was! But it was definitely a highlight of my trip!
They had several koalas there and this was an 8 month old baby named Otto and his mama, Maya. They were way too sweet.
I took a train back down to Cairns and it was very cool. The next day, I got to live the dream! Everyone had told me throughout my life that you aren't officially a marine biologist until you dive the Great Barrier Reef. So, regardless of the degree, I wasn't a marine biologist until this day!!! I got to do three dives and it was so incredible! I was the only certified diver on the boat so it was just me and my dive master. It was awesome because he was a marine biologist too and asked me what I wanted to see. I told him that I wanted to see the stuff that I couldn't see anywhere else. Needless to say, he showed me some beautiful animals! This is a giant clam and is average sized. It was so cool to see how huge they were!
The main thing that I wanted to see was a fish named Wally. He is a HUGE fish weighing in at an unreal 300 pounds! I had read about him and they said that he was like a puppy. He would come up and follow divers around and just chill. He was blind in one eye and would bump into people when he would turn around. I was STOKED! Sadly, we never saw him! I was heart broken!!!!!!! My dive master said that he had seen Wally a few days before but never saw him again. I missed him by two days! If I had known, I would have changed my whole trip around just to be there a few days earlier! I like to tell myself that Wally found some cute girl fish that he followed to another part of the reef...sweet, sweet Wally! I was disappointed but it was all made up for a few days later when I went whale watching! Story to follow in another post!
