opals!

So...i did it - after my FANTASTIC snorkelling in the extremely beautiful waters of the Great Barrier Reef ( one of the 7 wonders of the world, i'll remind you) i bought my australian opal. Its a beautiful solid white opal very shiny and sparkly with green and pink colouring in it. its a pretty darn big rock so it looks nice on my middle finger. iwould wear it on my right hand but my right handed middle finger is fatter then my left so i wear it on the left, although id rather wear it on the right. i'll get it sized when i get home. I try to buy myself an opal from every continent im at...sofar i have 3 - a pink one from greece, a fire one from mexico and now my australian one. it was the most expensive of the 3 but i enjoy it very much.

So back to snorkelling - got up a bit early (7am ) had breakfast and then hit the boat. They offered free 'tea, coffee and tea' - when i heard that i thought...maybe there are 2 different kinds of tea? but nope. the first tea is the drink - the 2nd tea is sort of like a light breakfast i guess. muffins, carrot cake type stuff...weird australians.

after that we took off to the reef - 1hr 10min boat ride out there and it was fast! 35knots i think. very different from being on a sail boat. our first dive was on the outer reef or 'ribbon reef' i dont remember the actual name of the reef we were on but it was the outer part of the great barrier reef. on this reef i saw REEF SHARKS! very safe animals - they swam away when i tried to swim towards them but it was still pretty cool. lots of coral, damsel fish, parrot fish, angel fish (haha i did my studying before hand) and rabbit fish.

we did 2 more snorkels after that at different reefs closer to mainland but i think the first was prolly the coolest (cuz of the sharks) at the other ones i saw more of the same - at the last one i saw NEMO! our snorkel guide took us on a tour around the last reef and she brought up a sea star (the star formally known as starfish - its not a fish at all so they're trying to direct people away from calling it a starfish) for us to look at and a sea slug - both pretty cool animals. i think i dissected them both in highschool during marine biology class.

and that was my day - gotta figure out how im going to get to the airport tomorrow and then alice springs it is! also need to get some accommodation figured out and that is that.

missing you all much!

Alia