The Technicolor finds of the Great Barrier Reef

Liz Newman

What’s great about the Great Barrier Reef?

The object of our trip down under was a 12-day cruise from Sydney,

Australia, to Auckland, New Zealand, but because it’s a

24-hour-round-trip flight from here, my husband Lee and I didn’t

expect to make the journey twice.

We wanted to see as much as we could while we were there. We’d

enjoyed dozens of nature shows on the glorious fish and coral of the

Great Barrier Reef. How could we go all the way to Australia and not

explore it for ourselves?

Because of the upside-down seasons in the Southern Hemisphere, we

chose late December to travel: winter here; summer there.

After a cool and rainy two days in Sydney, we boarded Qantas for

our three-hour flight north to Cairns, a prime port for shipping

tourists into the waters of the Reef. Stepping off the plane was much

like arriving in Hawaii. Instantly, we knew we were in the tropics.

The air was warm and humid, and palm fronds swayed against an

unsullied blue sky.

We stayed at the Cairns Hilton, between the upscale Pier Market

and the colorful Esplanade, a touristy strip of souvenir shops,

restaurants and sidewalk cafes. The ferry we would take to the Great

Barrier Reef was within walking distance of the hotel.

Though we’d heard that the reef can be seen from outer space, we

hadn’t conceptualized its vastness. The Great Barrier Reef is, well,

G-R-E-A-T -- like the Grand Canyon is G-R-A-N-D. According to the

Marine Park Authority, there are 30 distinct “bioregions,”” and they

stretch for 1,500 miles north/south and beyond the eastern horizon.

We visited Moore Reef, two hours from Cairns by a ferry quite similar

to the Catalina Flyer.

A stop at Fitzroy Island, one of many reef islands, broke up the

trip. The snorkelers and sun lovers among us had an hour to enjoy the

shore, while Lee and I and other day trippers took the rainforest

tour, shaded by towering eucalyptus and brilliant red flame trees.

Fitzroy is a rain forest, lush with trees and flowers. By

contrast, its beach is a narrow gray stretch of broken, sun-bleached

coral. It is illegal to remove coral from the reef. I examined an

average-sized piece, though. It was about as big as my index finger

and hard, porous and scratchy.

Another hour on the catamaran brought us to Moore Reef. We docked

at a pontoon platform about as big as a tennis court, which provided

a base for snorkeling, scuba diving, and deep-sea-diver walks through

the living coral. Lee and I explored the reef on a glass-bottom boat

and a semi-submersible (much like Disneyland’s).

The Aquarium in Sydney had exhibited many reef fish, and we

anticipated seeing even more -- every tropical fish we had seen on

every underwater program we had watched.

Of course this couldn’t be: the Great Barrier Reef is biologically

too diverse for all types of fish to be in one area, and we couldn’t

go deep enough to view the unique tropical fish whose glowing beauty

had wowed us during those compactly edited documentaries. Many

schools of fish did swim by the submersible’s windows -- striped and

spotted, electric blue, orange and black, silver, and golden. One

variety resembled Catalina Island’s bright orange garibaldi.

While we were somewhat disappointed that we hadn’t seen hundreds

of varieties of fish, the coral display wowed us indeed. The glass

bottom of the viewing boat seemed just inches above acres of

Technicolor coral in a multitude of shapes --waving leaves, huge

boulders, ferns, fingers, tubes and configurations that looked like

the human brain.

To us, this was the great aspect of the Great Barrier Reef, the

reef itself. It would be exciting to view it from all of the access

points. Maybe we will make that 15,000-mile trip again someday.

* LIZ NEWMAN is a Corona del Mar resident.