Airlie Beach and the Sea Plane

Suddenly I'm miss money bags and I'm booking things like sea plane rides out to the Great Barrier Reef.  I'm deciding that since Southeast Asia is going to be really really cheap (seriously, I found a 3 star hotel today for $14 per night) I can't keep stressing out about how expensive it is here.  Anyway, we took a cab out to the Whitsunday Airport, which turned out to be a little runway and a lobby with two couches.  Outside were two seaplanes just sitting right in front of the lobby windows.  I started to get nervous about forgetting my Xanex.  The ride was really pretty smooth though and the view!  Wow...

Notice anything about the pilot?

Yep.  Crocs.  That just aint right.

This is called the heart reef.  It's so cool!  It's pretty small and we looped over it a few times so everybody could get a good look:

We did a water landing!  Some people that were with were going snorkeling on the reef and got dropped off at Reef World.  That was so amazing.  One time also we dipped down and skipped across the water for a while, but didn't land on it.  We were in the plane for an hour.  We flew over Hook Island, Whitsunday Island, Hamilton Island (which is where we flew into to get here) and then the reef.  I saw Manta Rays from the plane!  Swimming along, looking like they were flying under the water.  You could easily see them because they looked like big black diamonds.

At one point the pilot was sort of tapping/hitting one of the instruments to get it to work.  That and the crocs made me very nervous.  And then when it was all over, we got our picture with him and his back was very sweaty.