Heron Island was absolutely amazing. After our 2 free days in Cairns, we took a 21 hour long sleeper train ride to Gladstone. This was really by first big train trip, and I was soooo excited (my only other train ride besides the CalTrain was the TransAlpine in New Zealand, and that was only 4 hours long). The trip was awesome! It was 21 hours of my life where I had absolutely every excuse to be lazy and do nothing! I watched 2 movies and had a great 8 hours of sleep on the train! For one of the movies, 10 of us squished into a 2 person cabin room.
In the morning we arrived at the tiny port city of Gladstone where we boarded a 2 hr ferry to Heron Island. Since Heron Island is so small, the ferry only included our group, along with other Research Station workers, and the resort guests, as these are the only people allowed on Heron Island!
We got off the ferry and stepped onto essentially paradise island. The island was absolutely gorgeous.
Here is a shot of the research station where we stayed.
After a short orientation lecture about pretty much all the dangerous creatures that could either kill you or cause you a severe amount of pain, they gave us all our own wet suits, mask, snorkel, and fins, so we could snorkel anytime we had free time...
as long as we had a buddy with us..
and I had KL :)
On the first day, we went on an "introductory snorkel" our to the shipwreck to show that we were all competent to snorkel.
Not all our the groups got as lucks as we did, yet our snorkle was amazing! We say 3 or 4 turtles and 2 sharks!
KL took this photo - its her favorite pic of the trip so far!
The turtles are amazing! They are not scared of us at all, and you can pretty much swim right alongside them! Probably my favorite animal...
and the sharks are completely harmless
Our life on the island was amazing. The food was ridiculously good! The chef Maggie took a little bit of warming up to, but after a few rough patches (including her yelling at us for the most absurd things then apologizing a couple minutes later) we became pretty good friends! Maggie fed us 5 meals a day! We had breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, then dinner. And by tea, I dont just mean tea. We had cake, muffins, biscuits, fruits and a ton of other delicious snacks.
Between lectures, we explored the island,
Me, Ilan, and Coop (you can see the shipwreck we snorkeled to in the background)
It took about 35 minutes to walk around the entire island! Some mornings I would go on a run, once or twice around the island! In the morning you could normally see a ton of sting rays in the shallow water, and one morning I saw a turtle on the beach! Definitely a great way to start the day.
After a couple days of mostly lectures, we headed out into the field for our lab groups. These labs included a
reef flat lab where we went out and recorded the type of coral we found in the reef flat during low tide,
plankton lab, collecting plankton from a boat at 4 different locations over the reef, then once off the dock at night;
invertebrates lab, which i actually missed since I was sick :( ; and
coral lab where we were actually in a real lab conducing an experiment and using cool equipment
Probably my favorite lab was the
fish lab, where we went on a snorkel and were given underwater digital cameras to take pictures of fish (and anything else cool we saw), then we identified some of the fish and presented them to our group.
Here are some of my favorite photos:
we saw an octopus...
then it got scared and changed color right in front of us!
There were soooo many sting rays everywhere
and some even let us get really close! (Thats me to the left staring at the ray.)
We saw a lot of giant clams
and of course a ton of pretty corals and fish
NEMO!!!!!
Of course, between all this class work, we still found for the essentials...
laying out on our essentially private beach
and of course taking tons of pictures!
many of which involved jumping...
This is from our last day, right before the ferry left! :(
We also watched the sunset almost every night
ANeil, Helen, Will, Me, KL, and Ilan
KL, Me, Lisa, and Liz
then went inside for an amazing dinner, then headed back out to look at the sky just lit up with stars. One night a couple of us even slept on the beach. It was freezing, but waking up to the sunrise was incredible!
During our free time, we also went on a bunch of snorkels at different spots on the island. Sometimes the water was warm enough that we didn't even need a wet suit!
were still trying to figure out how to smile underwater...
After our final (yes, in between all these pictures we actually had a lot of lecture and a TON of material to review for our final!), the Research Station threw us a party. Apparently somebody staying at the station just happened to have an entire DJ set up. So on research station on this tiny island on the Great Barrier Reef, we had an actually pretty legit party with a DJ, fog machine, and strobe lights!
Our professors even bought us a case of beer to celebrate finishing our final, which they helped us drink :)
Jocelyn, KL, Steven, Me, and Mike (a researcher on Heron)
Since I had already completed by TRP in the Rainforest, instead of having 3 days of TRP research on Heron lsand, I had free time! During this days, we played volleyball, including an intense tournament, with mixed teams including our tutors and professors. My teams didn't quite do so well, but at least we had fun right?!
We also had the opportunity to go on another boat dive, where we saw a ton of sharks and I touched a turtle! Unfortunately I didn't have a camera with me, but there was this one "kodak moment" I will never forget, where I saw one turtle pretty close to me, then there were 3 sharks swimming in the background!
During most of the course, we weren't really allowed on the resort premise (apparently there had been some issues with groups in the past), but during our TRP days, we had one "resort visit" scheduled with a mandated dress code. We all pulled out our nice clothes which was a big change for our bathing suits and workout clothes we had been wearing pretty much every other day, and headed to the gorgeous resort.
Me, Jocelyn, KL, Ryan, Coop, and Elena
The bar was completely deserted, beside maybe 3 couple, just sitting next to each other and barely (if at all) talking. Since we had such a big group, we had a good time, but definately didn't feel like we missed out on much those other "non-resort visit" nights.
there were soooo many open tables/seats everywhere!
Since drinks at the bar were FIFTEEN dollars (which is an absurd price for poor college student, even in australia), 3 of my friends and I decided to each buy one drink and all share, so we all got to try 4 different drinks without paying a ridiculous amount of money!
At least the drinks were really good! They had all sorts of fruity tropical drinks! The resort even had a lifesize chess board outside. Even though I really don't quite know how to play chess, it was still pretty fun to try!
One morning, we also had the change to scuba dive through the resort. The research station gave us a special deal, letting us use their equiptment with a resort guide/boat, so we got a really good rate. The dive was awesome, and we saw sooo much amazing coral reef and gorgeous fishgetting ready for our dive
and in the water!!!!
The last morning on the island, we got up at 4:30 to watch the sunrise. It was unbelievable.
walking back along the beach after watching the sunrise
(Liz, Me, Coop, KL, and Ryan)
While waiting for the ferry, we had time for one last photoshoot...
