We attended the first annual Redbull Flugtag event in Hong Kong on October 10th. For those of you not familiar with Flugtag, here is a brief description.
Red Bull Flugtag challenges teams of everyday people to build homemade, human-powered flying machines and pilot them off a 30-foot high deck in hopes of achieving flight! Flugtag may mean “flying day” in German, but all these crafts ultimately splash into the waters below. They are judged not only on their flight’s distance, but creativity and showmanship as well.
I think the Hong Kong teams need a little more practice. There really wasn’t one good flight that day. It looked like a few had potential but pretty much all of them fell rather than flew off the ramp. Either way, it was still pretty funny.
I’ll make this quick. It doesn’t even come close to what the Maldives has to offer. The scuba diving in the Maldives is far superior in every aspect. The coral, fish, visibility, water temp, service, boats… everything related to scuba diving is better in the Maldives. Check out my previous ports on the Maldives to read more about it.
This isn’t to say that the scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef isn’t amazing because it is. There is just better places out there. This surprised me because of the hype that this reef gets. I was expecting something spectacular and it was just ok. We still had a blast and would definitely recommend a trip to do some diving.
After we did two days of scuba diving we needed a break and wanted to visit some of the other sites around Port Douglas. First, we took a tour with Tony’s Tropical Tours which took us to the Mossman Gorge, the Daintree Rainforest and Cape Tribulation.
Daintree River Crocodile
One of the coolest attractions was the Wildlife Habitat in Port Douglas. They have a program were you can have breakfast with the birds. It’s sounds exactly like what is says. They have a buffet breakfast setup (which was actually quite good) and you eat while birds are flying around and some even trying to steal your food. Once your done with your breakfast you can spend some time walking around the zoo. We’ve been to a lot of zoos and while it was pretty small it ranks as one of the better ones around.
We did quite a bit of research (as usual) for our trip to the Great Barrier Reef. One area that I spent a lot of time on was choosing a dive boat. There are a lot of dive boats that service the Great Barrier Reef but one that kept coming up as better than the rest in the forums, etc was Poseidon Cruises. Poseidon goes to the Agincourt Ribbon Reefs which are on the outer reefs and was the area I wanted to visit.
Dive Deck
So we booked 2 trips with 3 dives each day. You can also go snorkeling on the same boat if you are not a diver. The fact that they have snorkelers and divers on the same boat did concern me. It also concerned me that the boat was so big. It can handle up 90 passengers. That is a lot of divers/snorkelers. As you can see from the pic it can get pretty crowded down there. Especially when you are near the boat.
Lots of divers
Overall, the boat and crew did a good job and allowed us to get a lot of dives in relative comfort (Miki got a little sea sick on the trip out to the outer reefs).
However, I wish there was a boat out there that could go out to the outer reefs but only carry a max of 12 divers. Having so many people around made the experience feel like a scuba diving assembly line.
We went on a quick trip to do some scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia this past summer. We stayed at a surprisingly nice resort in Port Douglas. The Sea Temple Resort & Spa in Port Douglas. We weren’t expecting anything spectacular but its nice to be surprised. The main feature of our room was that you could swim out from your balcony right into the pool. There was a very large main pool and then a lagoon that looped around the entire property. I haven’t ever seen anything like it before and we definitely made good use of the pool.
Sea Temple Resort & Spa Port Douglas - swim out room
The room was a 2 bedroom apartment with a full kitchen… basically a full service apartment. The staff was nice and the restaurant was also ok. Other than the swim out feature it was a pretty standard 4/5 star resort. The place was very popular with families which meant a lot of kids… I mean A LOT of kids. It didn’t bother us too much but if you’re looking for a romantic quit getaway then look elsewhere.
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