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We are now on the Great Barrier Reef, probably on
our last stop. We keep falling behind schedule and we need to get moving
to Darwin, our last stop in Australia. In Darwin we will pick up a new
correspondence school system; we ordered it from Cairns. I will be doing
the University of Nebraska (they do correspondence high school), and Emma
and Douglas are doing Calvert.
We are now at a beautiful island called
Lizard Island. There actually are lots of monitor lizards here, some of them
quite big. When they hear us coming they scurry into the underbrush and
then stop and stand stock-still. Normally they don't go far enough to be
out of view though; they don't seem to understand that we can still see
them. There are also lots of tourists here because there is a very
expensive resort, and it doesn't welcome cruisers or campers. In the resort
'you're paying for the location, not five star service', and we get the
location for free! It is really a beautiful island: lots of beaches,
clear water, and steep hills with trails running up them to get wonderful
views. We climbed up 'Cooks Look' one day for the view. Captain Cook is a
real celebrity in this part of the world, in all of the travel books,
museums, etc. He named many of the islands (including Lizard Island),
was the first white man to have contact with the Aborigines, and was the
first European to discover things like the kangaroo. He did lots of
exploring around here. Cooks Look was the place he climbed up to try to
see his way through the reef. It was a long climb (1000ft up in altitude)
but the view from the top was great. We could see down into the harbor and
out to the reef. All of those tropical-water colors stood out really
well. In the main anchorage there are lots of boats; there were about 25
when we arrived. It didn't really matter though because we could still
have the beach right in the anchorage pretty much to ourselves. It was a
very long beach and the sand was perfect for building in. It also had sand
running way out in the water, no coral, which was great. We have some
cruising friends from Seattle on a boat called Hoptoad that we met here
for the first time since Vanuatu. There are two boys on board, Shawn age
12 and Jeff, who turned 15 while we were here. We went ashore with them
every day after school and built in the sand or played in the water. There
aren't that many kids out here, especially my age, but the ones we make
friends with we are with all day long every day, until one of us moves
on. The Hoptoads have a tradition where on birthdays Sonny (the Dad),
makes a treasure hunt, so we got to go on one with Jeff and Shawn. Sonny
is very good at making treasure hunts. The clues were all poems and all
very hard to work out, but once we understood them the next clue was easy
to find. There were clues on shore; one tied to Hoptoad's anchor; one in
the ruin of a stone house that a woman called Mrs Watson lived in (before
being driven off by Aborigines and dying of thirst on a nearby island);
and some on the boats. We all had to think very hard to figure some of
them out. It was a lot of fun. The Hoptoads have the same plans as us
pretty much, going through the Med, only they are taking three more years
instead of two. They haven't decided where they are going to spend their
extra year though. The snorkeling on the popular, sheltered side of the
island wasn't too good, but yesterday we came over to the Blue Lagoon on
the opposite side of Lizard Island, and the snorkeling here is very good,
it ranks with Fiji. Today we went snorkeling twice, even though it is
windy and rough here. There is lots of live coral and lots of fish; very
colorful, and the visibility is quite good. All we have for protection
here is the reef so it is quite lumpy and uncomfortable today. Tomorrow we
plan to leave, heading north to Thursday Island and the Torres Strait.
Lizard Island is really a great spot, up with our best. We really feel
lucky to be on this trip when we get to places like this.
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