Go to bed excited, ready for the following day and during the night you have an email to say ‘your trip is cancelled, you have been refunded’. Nooooooo! If I’m being honest, I did expect something to say part of your trip had been rearranged due to problems with the train line, not, it’s been cancelled completely. Deep depression, this is the Whale trip in New Zealand all over again.

It was a good sunrise but the day had not started well. Weather forecast for the next few days was rain on the way in. Julie was on a mission to get me out. We will do something! We pack the ruck sacks and head out, ready for anything but I’m not hopeful. Julie is. We find..

Jessica informs is that there is no way we could have gone on the train to the rainforest as its been out for a while and won’t be back in action until next Saturday at the earliest.

Jessica phones to see if she can get us a return trip on the Skyrail gondola today. She can’t, they are already behind and are not taking any more bookings for today. Julie asks ‘what can you offer us for today, going anytime soon’. Jessica pulls the rabbit out of the bag. ‘How about a boat trip to Green Island with some snorkelling on the great barrier reef’ she says. ‘Sold’ I say. But the boat leaves at 11am so you have half an hour to get there. Where is the boat? I ask. It’s 5 minutes walk up the road (10 for Julie – poorly knee). She makes the phone call, we make the boat! Jessica the Superstar! If you are looking to book a trip in Cairns, look no further than Jessica at The Travel Shop. Thanks Jessica. No we are not sponsored by the Travel Shop and yes, we paid for the trip. We were just grateful Jessica managed to find us something so good to do.

We have Tea and a cookie… They don’t have cake! We share a table to have our tea with a with a lady from Adelaide, who is on a ‘sanity break’ holiday from her daughter and grand kids she lives with. It’s a sanity break for both she informs us.

We head for ‘Marineland Melanesia’, a family business started in 70’s where they have an aquarium, a turtle pool and collection of crocodiles, along with lots of Australian artefacts. Now I’m not an animal rights activist and I think these days, zoos do some good conservation work but, I wasn’t very comfortable watching crocodiles perform for food. The chap said it’s good exercise getting them to jump for food but it did not sit well with me.

We left and went to the beach to do our snorkelling.

We had over an hour snorkelling on the reef. Saw Dory and Nemo and a load of other fish that were amazing. We have video and I’ll see if I can upload some on to the website but I need to edit it first as it’s quite a long video and I’m limited on how much space I have on the website.

This experience certainly made up for the disappointment of the rainforest trip.