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Where to see Great Barrier Reef?
The GBR is huge - huge! So where do you recommend seeing it?
We'd be interested in snorkeling (possibly diving if we can get ourselves motivated to get certified) and shark cage diving.
Re: Where to see Great Barrier Reef?
I'm planning a trip here as well...I'm finding Cairns or Port Douglas are pretty much the best location to base yourself out of. Then it's just a matter of finding a tour company you want to work with. I've been making my way down the list of tours on trip advisor.com
There are also some great little islands off of Cairns that you can stay on and go snorkeling/diving from as well. I stayed on Magnetic island years ago and it was beautiful. Not sure if much has changed but it was so tiny that you could hire a golf cart and drive all around the island to the different beaches.
ETA Magnetic island is closer to Townsville than Cairns but not far. here is a link. You can do a lot of snorkeling right there on the island as well and they have loads of interesting wildlife and a pack of roaming koalas.
http://www.magvac.com.au/info.html
We stayed in Port Douglas for part of our honeymoon and a lot of tours left from there (some even picked up people in Cairns, then went up to PD to head out to the Reef).
I looked up shark cage diving on the Reef because I was pretty surprised they offered it, and according to this site they don't. It sounds like you can do it with Great Whites farther south, though.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
My Travel Blog
You will find shark diving closer to Adelaide and probably Perth, but the area around Adelaide definitely has it. We did not see any advertising for shark diving in the reef area.
You might want to consider staying overnight on the Reef. We regret not doing that because we ended up taking two different day tours to snorkel (one out of Port Douglas and one out of Cairns), but will do it if we ever go back.
We went on an overnight diveboat (Reef Encounter) out of Cairns and had a blast. I was already certified, but there were a couple of people doing that on the boat. If you have a few days, I'd recommend you get certified there instead of trying to do it at home unless you live somewhere with interesting diving. There were a few people getting certified while we were out there, and they still got a chance to see a lot while doing their certification dives, and then were free the rest of the trip to do as they pleased. You can also do an intro dive where you are closely supervised by an experienced diver if you are short on time and don't get certified.
ETA: We saw sharks on a night dive, and they were not cage-worthy, maybe 6 feet long and swam away when we scared them. Lots of tiny fish, turtles, sting rays, barracudas, coral, starfish, etc.
ETA2: Oh and also, you can just snorkel if you'd prefer that, but why would you want to just snorkel?
Thanks for the info.
Anybody else feel free to chime in if you've got more!
We based ourselves out of Port Douglas, which we really liked. It was a nice town, fairly quiet and not overly touristy, although we were there off season (March) which may have made a difference.
We only went snorkeling (not diving), and as pp has mentioned, if you want to snorkel on the reef, I'd recommend going on a snorkel only boat. We did the snorkeling day trip on Sailaway to the Low Isles, and it was great (although there was no wind at all, so there wasn't actually any sailing!). They only take out pretty small groups, which we liked a lot.
Cecilia arrived 12 October 2012
Did you do the full day sail & snorkeling tour?
I would never have even thought of Port Douglas without this thread, I'm glad I asked.
I went to Cairns to see the reef, did a snorkeling tour and skydiving. Have fun!! It's beautiful!!!!!!!!!!
If you come to the Cairns/Port Douglas area, we can have a GTG!
ETA: H says to try to not go to Green Island.
We tried to plan some of our trip before we got out to Australia. We heard more about Cairns being the city from which you take tours out to the GBR so we booked lodging there and held off on booking a reef tour until we arrived. When we arrived at the Cairns airport and picked up the rental car the agent recommended that we spend some time in Port Douglas. We're glad we did. It was no problem to book a room last-minute (it was early April). Port Douglas has a sandy beach and the stinger net was rolled out for swimmers. There's a cute little downtown and we had no problem finding a decent place to eat. We also had a kitchen in our suite. We weren't certified to dive and we could still dive but it was limited. We received instructions on how to use the equipment and technique on the boat ride out to the reef. We went down with 4 people to 1 instructor and we were limited to a certain depth. We stopped at 3 different reefs and had the option to either snorkel or dive. This amount of diving was enough for us beginners. We used Calypso tour company and only signed up for a day tour.
We didn't like Cairns at all. There's no sandy beach (only mud flats that are visible at low tide). There are so many backpackers and the town looked a little dingy. We'd only stay there if our diving tour was headed out from there. I don't know how the reefs there compare to the ones that you can access from Port Douglas but I think that you'll have an overall nicer experience in Pt. Douglas.