Roo Around The World

On my last full day in Cairns I finally did one of the things I’ve always dreamt about (it’s even on my bucket list)…scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef! It was absolutely incredible and definitely lived up to my expectations. You can read all about it here, in the article I wrote for Gap Daemon as part of my Travelling Internship.

*An aside note: I wanted to just write a quick review about the company we went with, Down Under Cruise & Dive. While i cannot fault the staff, the snorkelling, or the diving itself, I do have a few issues with the way we were treated by the company.

We booked our trip through Wicked Travel, so just had to call up to book onto a particular date when we arrived in Cairns. We called this week and they said they had no availability until the Saturday, which we didn’t think we could do as we were flying the next day. Then they somehow managed to get us onto the Friday trip so everything was sweet. Then they phoned us the next day and said that actually the boat was having maintenance done on the Friday so would be out of the water and could we go on Saturday…we explained about flying, but they said we could go as long as we had at least 12 hours between diving and flying, which we did, so we said yes and were booked for the Saturday. Then when we arrived at the ferry terminal to check in this morning (Saturday), we were told that the boat we were supposed to be on was out of the water and we’d been upgraded to their sister company’s boat. Awesome…or so we thought.

The boat we were put on was definitely NOT an upgrade. It was smaller (but with more people as it had those who were supposed to be on that boat, as well as everyone else in the same situation as us), the promised BBQ lunch was nonexistent (and the food they did serve us really wasn’t great), there was no sun deck to lie on, and we didn’t get our advertised 5 hours of diving…it was probably closer to 3. So all in all, we felt a little duped. And it gets worse. We later found out that the boat we were supposed to be on has been out of the water for a month…and entire month! So when we phoned up to book onto it, they already knew we wouldn’t be able to actually go on the boat we paid for, and blatantly lied to us. Multiple times.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do with this information, if anything at all, and to be honest we had a great time despite everything. I just wanted to put it out there that it’s always wise to check and double check everything and never believe what someone on the other end of the phone tells you!