red back

It's the name of one of Australia's deadly spiders, but what I'm talking about today is the state of my own trailing side. After a day of snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef (a full day - almost 5 hours in the water) and an under-application of sunscreen, I came out with a serious sunburn. It probably was inevitable, given the amount of time my bare back faced the sun, but it's been a while since I had a painful burn.

Looks like the pattern for now is a bunch of (mostly prewritten) posts at once when I get a connection (and time).

We are in Cairns today (got in yesterday on the overnight bus, and essentially spent the day catching up on sleep as well as walking around the city center for an hour or two). I did the snorkel trip - didn't think I'd had enough after just two short snorkel sessions on our sailing trip. The reef looks just like the nature documentaries make it out to be. Brightly colored fish, lots of crazy shapes of coral, all sorts of different things everywhere you look. Didn't see anything really big - no turtles, no sharks. Saw a lot of fish I'd seen in aquariums or pet shops, and some I'd never seen before (lots of different parrotfish). The colors of the coral itself weren't quite as bright as the TV shows might have led me to believe, but I hear part of the problem is the tourism itself tends to kill some of the coral.

It's been a week of water - two nights on a sailboat (saw whales, attended a beach party, did a little snorkeling, stayed up too late and woke with the sunrise) followed by the day of snorkeling. Now we're headed to the land of no water - we fly to Uluru/Ayer's Rock tomorrow morning.