Blog Archives: January, 2007
Snorkeling and rainforests
After a 40-hour 4-flight 5-airport depart-Wednesday arrive-Friday journey, I arrived in Australia. Officially, I’m here attending the Quantum Information Processing (QIP) 2007 conference, which started yesterday in Brisbane. Unofficially, I’m also taking a little bit of time for some sightseeing in Australia and New Zealand.
We (I’m travelling with Lana and Gus from my research group) immediately went to Cairns, in the northeast part of Australia. From Cairns we took a day trip out to the Great Barrier Reef. Truly amazing. I went snorkeling on the reef back in 1999 when my parents and I came to Australia, and had a great time again. We went out on a relatively small boat (only 65 people, compared to some of the larger boats that take out up to 300) and enjoyed snorkelling off of Michaelmas Cay (a cay is not an island) and then at another patch of reef in the middle of the ocean. The latter was particularly cool because of the drop off. Remember in Finding Nemo when they look out from the reef into the deep blue waters of the drop off? It was exactly like that, and pretty scary: after the reef, all you can see is deep blue water. This morning I read some news that the Great Barrier Reef may not survive too much longer if the oceans warm. Let’s hope we can stop that from happening.
Barron Falls panorama The next day we went to the town of Kuranda to go hiking in the rainforest around the town. Not a very strenuous hike (a good portion of the trail is either paved or boardwalk), we still worked hard through the heat and humidity. We made it out to Barron Falls, pictured at left.
Now we’re in Brisbane for the week for the conference, and then 5 days in New Zealand before returning home. Our flight home should be nice and short — only 1 hour long! (We department New Zealand at 7:30pm and arrive in Toronto at 8:30pm the same day!)
