Petaj Mooring, Milln Reef
Great Barrier Reef, Australia (off Cairns, Queensland)
aboard Scuba Pro II (vessel)

16 June 2005

Early this morning, as we dragged ourselves out of bed to board a 30-passenger boat to spend three days and two nights on Australia's legendary Great Barrier Reef, I was not sure that it would be worth it. I have seen a good deal in this world, hiked to many places and driven to many more. They are all beautiful, awe-inspiring, even, but sometimes it seems to me that, in all their uniqueness, many of the places in this world are essentially variations on themes that I know well. Themes: cities, ruins, forests, bodies of water, mountains, wildlife, people. Everywhere I go-- everywhere I have gone, that is-- I have seen wondrous varieties of these things... but so rarely have I seen new things.

There have been many disappointments and frustrations in the past few days since we've begun this trip to tropical far north Queensland, Australia. The Great Barrier Reef, I am happy to say, is not one of them. Snorkeling was not what we had planned as a way to see the reef, but it is what we ended up with. I was so nervous this morning that, because it is not what we planned, it would not be what we hoped. And while our first choice of reef-seeing methods, diving, would also have been a new and amazing experience, snorkeling here is a much closer second alternative than I realized.

On one little tiny piece of this vast natural phenomenon, I saw in person and from reasonably close-up, more species of plant and animal that I had never seen before than I have in any other place in the world. Trees are trees-- no matter how many wonderful, beautiful different kinds of leaves and bark and branches they might have. But coral polyps are not trees, sea anemones are not trees, algae are not trees-- and they look to my land-locked eyes as alien as I do in a wetsuit and mask. Fishes in a tank, even in an aquarium habitat at a public museum, are one thing-- but fishes in the wild are something else altogether. I might glimpse a deer, a moose, a kangaroo, even a crocodile in passing from a car on the highway, but I will never ever accidentally see a fish, a coral, a white-tipped reef shark, unless I go to them... and that happens so rarely that it can't be accidental.

The fishes and corals and anemones and sea turtles of the Great Barrier Reef do not wander to our shorelines where I might glimpse them while swimming. Snorkeling today for the very first time, 30 kilometres away from Australia's shoreline, I saw a reef shark, two sea turtles, four giant clams, a dozen Moorish Idols looking like Gill in the movie Finding Nemo, and two dozen clownfish looking like Nemo himself. We saw parrotfish with all the shiny rainbow in their skin and fins that move vertically like the wings of a parrot. We saw a couple of the giant-seeming Napoleon Maori Wrasse, with a tall cliff of a forehead on their 18-inch high heads. We saw a Potato Cod that could feed a small army, angelfish of many colors, and their cousins the batfish that look just like the angelfish except that "they wouldn't fit in your frying pan." We saw sea cucumbers far away on the sandy floor, and tiny krill just a few centimeters in front of our masks. And we didn't have to touch a single piece of it.