So many blogs about the road trip. At this point I'm not even sure it y'all are reading them anymore. I promise, after Sunday, there isn't much left to talk about.
Saturday night was my turn to sleep in the top bed. From the "mattress" to the ceiling of the van there is probably about a foot and a half of space (just enough room to wiggle into your sleeping bag and then be able to roll over). When my alarm went off at 6:30 Sunday morning I instinctively sat up to try to find it, and bashed my head on the roof of the van. Then, I looked towards my feet and saw only black and panicked because I couldn't remember where I was. Thankfully, it didn't take too long to remember that I was in the top bed and I saved myself from hitting my head a second time.
We had packed all of our bags the night before, so Sunday morning pretty much consisted of getting out of bed, putting on our suits, locking the vans, and we were off to dive on Ningaloo Reef. We didn't have time to make ourselves breakfast so Megan and Jen walked next door to the caravan park to grab something to eat before the dive bus picked us up. While we were waiting for our bus another dive shop's bus pulled up and we overheard one of the employees telling their costumers that the dives and snorkeling for the day had been cancelled due to weather. At this point we thought this was the bus we were waiting for and Jess immediately left to go tell the girls at the Caltex that our dive had been cancelled. As it turned out, it wasn't our company and moments later our bus pulled up to get us...minus three girls. We ended up picking the other three up from the Caltex.
The diving was AMAZING. I am so decided that if the whole law school/federal law enforcement track doesnt work out than I am going to buy a boat and open a dive shop. Seriously, everyone who works on a dive boat is so friendly and they're all goofy people. And for some reason, they all really enjoy making fun of me. On the boat out to our dive sites Jess got seasick, and refused to take the seasickness medication for like half the day. She looked miserable and we tried really hard to convince her to take the medication but she was being stubborn and refusing to admit that she was seasick. Jeni and I were diving while the other four girls snorkeled.
We had our first dive and I was kind of nervous to dive for the first time without a divemaster checking in on me every few minutes, but it turned out to be really easy and the greatest thing I have ever done. On our first dive we got in the water (I did not fall on my face striding off the boat like I did the first time I did a boat dive) and when Jeni tried to equalize her mask a few feet down she must have popped a few blood vessels in her nose because she started bleeding profusely into her mask. It was super gnarly. The entire nose well of her mask was full of blood and it was splattered on the inside of the lenses too; I can only imagine how creepy it must have been to have had to look out of the blood splattered mask. And, I'm not going to lie, I was a little bit worried about sharks. Apart from Jeni bleeding everywhere, it was an really successful dive! We saw a MASSIVE manta ray, lots of pretty little tropical fish, and even a little turtle. More than anything, I was so happy to just be back underwater. It's really nice to swim through the coral and see things that so relatively few people ever have the opprotunity to see. And in itself, it's just awesome to be able to breathe underwater for 45 minutes. Speaking of breathing, apparently I don't breathe very much air at all; the divemaster actually asked me if I was a mermaid. I didn't know how to respond.
After our first dive we had our surface interval which mainly comprised of eating doritos and sitting in the sunshine. The morning had started out really, really rough with massive swells and kind of chilly, but by the afternoon it had turned into a beautiful day! I easily could have slept in the sunshine and been a happy camper. During our first dive the others had done their first snorkle trip as well; the weather had still been kind of crummy when they had gone out and from what I heard, it was kind of more work than it was worth.
Our second dive was even better than the first dive. We went further into Ningaloo Reef and it was gorgeous. There was so much color and all of the coral was just so delicate and exotic. The idiot we were diving with kept touching things and poking at stuff. I wanted to beat him upside the head with a wooden spoon! What kind of idiot doesn't know that you NEVER touch the coral? Jeez. I guess there's always that one person, which helps explain the accelerated rate at which our coral reefs are dying off at. Anyway, the water on the reef was so clear, you could see forever. It was also warm, which was a really nice change from diving at Rottnest. The swim throughs we did were all really pretty too, I think they are my favorite part about the reefs. At one point we were headed down towards another swim through when our divemaster did the hand signal for "shark" and pointed in the direction we were swimming some 20 feet ahead. It was a little reef shark, probably only a little longer than me, and it was just lazily swimming through the reef without being in any kind of particular hurry. Being the stupid humans we are, we swam towards it until it darted off and then kind of circled back up ahead of us. He was really pretty and I was so excited to have actually seen a real shark, but I made a point not to swim at the back of the group after he disappeared. We actually saw him later on our way back to the boat in the same place he had been earlier. So, I did not find Nemo (I'll have to look for him on the GBR) but I did see a shark!
Again, the other girls had done their snorkeling while Jeni and I were diving, and as part of the package we had signed up for Jeni and I were able to snorkel once with the girls as well. We had to pass Turtle Beach to get to our third site and as we got closer to the beach we noticed HUNDREDS of sea turtles on the beach and in the water. For a while we all sat on the boat and watched the turtles before the crew decided that we wouldn't find a much better place to snorkel than right there with a couple hundred sea turtles. Spring break of my freshman year of college my family went to Hawaii without me; when they came home they told me about everything they had been up to, and there was a story about how my little brother got attacked by a sea turtle when he was body boarding. Apparently the turtle had been riding the same wave as my brother and when he went to use his fins to swim my brother was too close to him and got "scratched" (if sea turtles can do such a thing...). The encounter left my brother with scars on the back of his leg. So, while I'm swimming with these turtles I remembered my brother adamantly telling me that a sea turtle attacked him, and all the subsequent jokes he was the butt of. Besides laughing at my brother's misfortune with sea turtles I also thought of Finding Nemo. Noggin'.
The turtles will really cool at one point I was swimming right next to one and I swear it looked me right in the eye when it glanced my direction. I kind of expected the turtles to be a little skittish and be uncomfortable with humans, but they didn't really seem to notice or care that we were swimming with them. I even got close enough to touch the shell of one. It was a really awesome experience and it started to make up for the awful stuff with the vans.
We finished up with the turtles, had lunch on the boat, and on our way back we came across a pod of Humpback Whales just off the coast! There were like 6 or 7 of them and even a little baby. We watched them for a while and it was like having a free whale watching trip on our dive trip! Bonus! I do have to say though, the unbelievably attractive divemaster on our trip was a pretty great addition to the overall awesomeness of the day. It's actually kind of impossible to describe how attractive this man was.
For dinner that night Megan made us breakfast tacos (more commonly known as breakfast burritos) and it was one of the best meals I have had in Australia. We had fun watching Jen, Sarah, and Jess enjoy their first experiences with breakfast burritos as well; apparently they aren't a normal breakfast food in England. We also played this card game after dinner that Jess convinced us would be SO much fun. It's called Chase the Ace and it was awful. I think we had more fun making fun of the game than we did playing it. Chase the Ace is definitely one of those games you play as a kid and it's a blast (like War) but then when you try to play it again you realize that being a kid was probably the only thing that made the game good. So that's how we spent our time in Exmouth. It was overall, the best day of our trip!
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