The Great Barrier Reef & Port Douglas

We tore ourselves away from Kewarra to drive up the coast just a bit to the smallish resort town of Port Douglas, the top hop-off point for tours of the Great Barrier Reef. It turned out to be an unexpectedly charming place, a compact burg with lots of fun shops, decent restaurants and cafes, and attractive accommodations that were more affordable than what we'd become used to in expensive Oz. We ended up spending five nights in a little holiday flat off the main street, exploring the region from there, and enjoying our morning conversations with Alessandro, the world-traveling Italian waiter at the corner cafe. It's a sumptuous patch of Australian tropics to explore, but of course, all the other attractions of the town and the region, even the glorious, ancient rainforest that poured over the surrounding mountain ranges, were secondary to our real purpose for coming here: The Great Barrier Reef. Mark had never even been snorkeling before, so the opportunity to start at the top, as it were, was irresistible and, as it proved out, unforgettable. Over 1500 species of fish inhabit the reef, the world's most diverse coral ecosystem, and that's to say nothing of the giant clams, tortoises, water snakes, all circulating around the myriad sponges and corals themselves. We were lucky enough to splash about in fine weather. Even if Mark's bristly moustache made for a bit of comic drama with a leaky facemask (a problem solved with a bit of vaseline), the experience of seeing an unspeakably vivid, prismatic world just inches from our faces, one in which every turn of the head revealed some startlingly unexpected shape or shade . . . well, it made us wonderfully aware why people sometimes put snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef near the top of those silly lists of things to do before you die. It's a trippy, sacred, topsy-turvy combination of sensations, a dream of flying through a drowned forest of giant, technicolor mushrooms or staring down into an inverted cathedral for worshipful fish, and there really is no other experience quite like this.

Daintree