Your Friend, Jacquie Cousteau

Hello all! I wrote that last post a while ago but haven’t had a chance to put it up until now. I am currently in a place called Townsville, and I’ve been having a really fun/crazy week. After leaving Melbourne, I got into Airlie Beach, which is an ugly tourist town, but is the gateway to the Whitsunday Islands, which are gorgeous. I flew in last Wednesday morning and left that evening on a big sailing boat with about 20 other people. I made friends with a group of Irish people my age right away, and we had a blast on the boat for the next 3 days—sailing around, snorkeling, scuba diving, playing cards, watching Finding Nemo, etc. Everyone else on the boat was really cool, too. Definitely the highlight was the scuba diving, though. We sailed out to the Great Barrier Reef and I went diving three times; the best sights were the whitetip shark (only about 4 feet, but cool all the same), the giant clam that snapped shut when my instructor waved his hand above it, some gigantic colorful fish called napoleon maori wrasses, some crazy-looking white fish with unicorn horns, and some bright red brain-looking coral. I hadn’t been diving since my certification (in Vancouver.. while it hailed, sleeted, and snowed on our surface intervals), so this trip was absolutely an improvement on my past dives.
The day after our dive trip my Irish friends and I just lazed around in Airlie Beach, and then came on the bus up the coast. I stopped off in Townsville, and they went on to Cairns. I got in pretty late Sunday night and left straightaway early Monday morning to do another dive trip, this time to the SS Yongala, which everyone around here says is in the top 10 dives in the world. It’s a shipwreck from 1911, and it was unbelievable—definitely the best dive I’ve ever done. We went down twice and saw turtles, snakes, eels, a gigantic school of barracuda, clownfish (Finding Nemo fish!), and a couple of really majestic, slow-moving manta rays. It was amazing. We swam all around the ship and right next to the masts. You can’t see any of the wood anymore, since it’s all covered in coral, but the structure of the boat is still there. I think about 150 people died in the wreck, and my instructor told me the skeletons were still in the boat until about 20 years ago (you can’t swim inside the ship anymore).

I’m going to take a couple of rest days here and then I fly back to Sydney on Thursday. I’ll just have 5 days in Australia left at that point, and I’m going to go hear the Dalai Lama speak (he’s doing an Oz tour this month), go to the Sydney Film Festival, and walk around some more. Then it’s off to Thailand! I can’t believe how quickly time is passing.

Thanks everyone for the nice birthday wishes and the emails. Hope you all are well and are enjoying the summer!

xoxo,
Sheri