20 Hours at the Great Barrier Reef - A Short Story

We had a 20 hour layover in Cairns on our way to Singapore and here's how it went...

I am enjoy turning up places on time, not early, not late but just on time. I give Eddie a headache most days. He's an early person.

Anyway I had booked a Great Barrier Reef cruise that boarded at 12:45pm and our flight was scheduled to land at 10:30am.

We had heaps of time!

Then we got the dreaded email 'your flight is delayed an hour and a half'... serves me right for flying with Jetstar.

We ended up landing in Cairns at 11:45am and found out, the airport hadn't registered our arrival.

So we stressfully waited on the plane until 12pm and rushed through airport security... of course our bags were last to come out making us look like idiots and getting us out of the airport at12.30.

You can imagine my stress and determination to make this non-refundable cruise.

Thank goodness an uber got us to the dock quickly and we quite literally just made the cruise, arriving there at 12.46 pm. 1 minute after they had begun boarding.

And for all that stress and worry, the cruise turned out to bring us far more pain than joy, putting Eddie in hospital and severely disrupting our travels. But that's another story.

I truly believe our plane delays were a sign from the universe.

We booked the tour with Big Cat Cruises and traveled to Green Island which was a lovely 'get away' and a nice temperature change to the NZ winter we were just in.

The reef however was quite disappointing with lots of dead coral and not very many sea creatures, the water also only came up to my knees making it hard to swim.

We wished we had booked a pontoon experience instead but we unfortunately just didn't have the time.

After our cruise we headed to our hostel which, thankfully, wasn't one of the notorious party hostels and then did a bit of exploring around Cairns' city centre.

There are loads of little arcades and a very popular nighttime food market however we opted for Hecho En Mexico on the sea front for some affordable and delicious Mexican food.

At dinner we noticed Eddie's lip began swelling but thought nothing of it at the time... stay tuned for the saga.

We were quite tired after our day of travel from NZ to Cairns to the Great Barrier and decided to hit the hay, but not before stopping by a woolies to get flight snacks for our early morning flight.

We had a 5am start, getting to Cairns Airport bright and early for our flight to Singapore, stopping over in Bali, Indonesia where Eddie had to receive medical attention in Denpasar Airport.