Good morning Cairns! (which we're still unsure of how to pronounce, our latest guess is "Kens"). Made it to our hotel last night, had a quick dinner in town, and were in bed by 830pm last night (well, Stephen was in bed that early - I was up a little later unpacking and whatnot). Therefore, we were up bright and early at 530am, indicating we may still be a little jet-lagged. :)
We had yet another delicious breakfast - 2 days in a row of Sabrina-safe food - which is pretty exciting. 9am rolled around and a shuttle came and picked us up to take us to our first day of PADI-certified SCUBA class. We arrived at the shop, signed in, and headed to the classroom. Turns out, its just the two of us enrolled in this particular class, which means we'll get a lot of attention from the teacher/instructor. We'll see how that turns out.
Our instructor is approximately 26, female, from Germany, who came to Cairns on a foreign exchange program for school, who never returned. She has her degree in Tourism and is a full-time dive instructor with the Deep Sea Divers program. She's really cheerful and excited to teach.
We spent the morning watching a video from the 90's (including 90's cellphones) that would appear to have been filmed in Monterey, CA, given all of the kelp forests and intense wetsuits.
Good news - we passed all of our mini-exams and after lunch, got to get into the pool and start our confined water experiences. Even though the water was 82F, we opted for short wetsuits, seeing as how we were going to be in the water for up to 3 hours. Good call on our parts, even though the water was fairly pleasant.
Between good teaching by Pamela and our past partial experiences SCUBA diving, we finished all of our lessons for today in under 2 hours. Stephen is still working on reaching neutral buoyancy while I'm trying to not hold my breath constantly - still a little hard to get over that hurdle.
By 4pm we were water-logged and smelling quite strongly of chlorine. We dried off and returned to the hotel. Current evening plans include wandering down town, possibly checking out the ukelele festival going on two blocks over, and sleeping in preparation for another long day of SCUBA diving and learning.
Since I refuse to post a blog with 0 pictures (especially since we have over 500 from the first 3 days), here are two pictures from our hotel balcony - a casino and the ocean.
Here's to more posts tomorrow!
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