Onwards to New Zealand

Hello friends and family!!!

We are in Sydney, about to depart for the island of New Zealand!

We spent our last days in Cairns famously, taking a day boat out to the great barrier reef. It was called the Compass...we called it Clanker the Tanker, or simply "The Box". As it cut the water, like a box. At some points we thought we would fly off of the back deck. Infact we were told to move for this exact reason. Kira and Kat were taken over by giant waves within the first hour of hitting the water. They were soaked the entire trip. The day we went out to the reef was a rough one. 20-30 knot winds, 2metre swells. Also known as a good puking time. Everyone, basically, on our boat vomited overboard. There were bags everywhere and a woman hurling into the garbage right beside us. Kat had given awesome advice to Kira and Claire to eat lots of gravol before enduring the trip. This was a great idea. We didn't vomit. And instead rode the waves like 5 year olds.

2.5 hours later we got to the reef. The sun had been out for about 20 minutes so we felt we had gotten some pretty decent weather. The waves were fun and feeling like we wre going to topple overboard proved to be more fun than we had expected. We made friends with one of the dive instructors named "Puck". He put Kat into what she called "The Vice" as he tried to hug us and make friends. Our first stop was at Hastings Reef. Kat went on a guided dive with 4 other certified divers as Claire and Kira experienced their first introductory dive. Kat saw a giant 2metre reef shark on her dive and some cool giant cod. Claire and Kira experienced their first dive and also saw a giant cod with a cleaner wrasse in its mouth. Kira cut up her fingers and knees as she dove through a tunnel in the reef. They were holding hands for some but the instructor let them free once they got to the reef. They saw some sea cucumber poop that ended up being super clean sand. Once they emerged Kat cheered from the top deck and they embraced.

We had some lunch, forgetting to tell the boat we were vegetarians. So we ate a bun. We weren't really hungry anyways. Our next stop was at a new reef where Kira and Claire decided to invest in another dive. Kat had her second dive to do still and we all decided to go together!!!

The picture above proves how excited we were. We went with our new friend "Puck" who guided us along the ocean floor. This was the most epic dive ever. We started off slowly, as Claire picked up a sea cucumber and its guts spewed out. We kept going, pretty fast. You see Puck had promised to find a turtle for us. So he was on a mission. We kept going, having lots of fun along the way. Finally we saw a sea turtle. A giant one. It was a species of turtle that doesn't really like people so it swam away, but not after going up for more air and diving back down. This was really cool. We kept swiming seeing 4 triggerfish each of which were almost a metre long each. Finally we were face to face with a green sea turtle. These turtles love being scratched and touched, and luckily Puck had brought some weed for us to feed it. We fed the turtle by hand, and Puck put some weed on our masks so the turtle kissed our cheeks. He put a weed in Kat's mouth so the turtle came over and kissed her on the lips as he took the food! We spent about 15 minutes with the little guy having the time of our lives. He kept coming back for more, food or no food with his mouth wide open. We made great friends that day with the little dude.

Alas air was running low, so we headed back to the boat. We were so pumped up from our dive we spent the whole way back to Cairns singing to the skippers beats and laughing at Puck. We were so exhausted we didn't go out that night, but celebrated our last day in Cairns aka St. Patrick's day with some Snakebites at the bar. We got home late and got up early for our flight to Sydney. We got into Sydney early the next day and got on a train to Wollongong.

Sheila lives in Wollongong, so we stayed with her for 3 nights and partied with her new friends from school on the first night. We went to a bar named Cooney's that played amazing dance music and the 4 of us danced together all night. We had lots of fun but had to say goodbye. Sheila is spending the long weekend at the Blue Mountains, and we are spending it flying to New Zealand...TODAY! Actually Tonight! We get into Christchurch tonight and are staying at a Holiday Inn thanks to Kira's connections. We will get our van on the 25th and meet up with Kat's Tbay friend Brodie and we will explore the South Island. More updates will come from our Wicked van.

Hope you all have a great Easter! We love and miss you

xoxo

Kat Claire and Kira!