I'm in Airlie Beach now. I got the Greyhound down from Cairns yesterday with Gemma, a girl I met in Darwin and then again in Cairns. It took 11 hours and was horrible because it was full, unlike any of the buses we'd been on up the west coast. The first driver we had was grumpy, and the second one had never driven a Greyhound before and couldn't change gear! I reckon I could drive a Greyhound better than him! He kept going past the bus stops and having to turn around - at Airlie Beach he actually had to do a u-turn! I will be here until tomorrow, when I start my tour around the Whitsunday Islands. I'm so excited to get back on a boat again.

Which brings me to my diving course. I loved every minute of it, except for putting on the wetsuit. :) The course started last Friday, and involved both theory lessons and practical lessons in the Pro Dive diving centre. On the Friday morning we did half the theory with our instructor Matti, who is Swiss and has the strangest German-Australian accent. After lunch and our medical tests we were split up into two groups for our first practical lesson, and I had an English instructor called Tom. Once we were in the water with all our gear on we started to practice skills such as kneeling on the bottom of the pool (4m deep) and taking our masks off and putting them back on and clearing the water out of them. The worst one was taking off our weight belts and putting them back on again, as we all started floating about and bumping into each other :) The second day was more of the same, and we learned how to calculate safe diving times and depths, taking into account all the nitrogen in our bodies. Then we had to take the theory test, which we all passed :) Being able to breathe underwater felt amazing and not as unnatural as I thought it would. The instructors used very clear hand signals and every time we got a skill right they would give us a high five or shake our hands underwater.

So on Sunday morning we got picked up from our hostels at about 6am and were on the boat and leaving Cairns by 7am. There was my Open Water Diving group, a German-speaking OWD group, an Advanced OWD group, and a bunch of certified divers who were just joining us for the trip. Our coxwain was called Ben, and there were four instructors and a chef. The team was very professional and really well organised - we had safety numbers that they checked everytime we got out of the water, and we had to sign a chart to say we were out the water too. There was always someone on lookout too. They briefed us before every dive and learnt all our names really quickly. Over the first two days at sea I did four certification dives, where we had to demonstrate the mask skills and safety procedures (such as what to do if you run out of air down there), and also navigation skills. After I became a certified OW diver (TEE HEE!!!), I opted to do the Adventure Diver course too. This meant that only two of the next four dives were unsupervised, and our instructor took us down to 30m and on a night dive, so I am now certified to dive to 30m (rather than just 18m for OW divers) and at anytime of the day or night unsupervised. Whenever anyone dives, however, they must have a buddy. For most of my dives my buddy was Therese, a Norwegian girl, or Henrick from Sweden.

Diving at night was not at all as scary as it sounds - it's really peaceful and everyone is a lot more focussed on what they can see - as you can only see what your torch is pointing at. And diving to 30m was incredible. We did that dive at 6.30 in the morning, on a site that the crew can rarely go to because it needs really calm weather conditions. So it was special. All the fish were just waking up and moving around - massive schools were passing by above us and around us :) Going down deeper means that divers can experience nitrogen narcosis, and Matti carried out an experiment to show us how it works. At 30m we all knelt in the sand and he asked us all to close our eyes and count to 20 seconds and then open our eyes. In fact it took me 36 seconds, which proved the narcosis affected me a bit. It's not dangerous; everyone just functions a bit slower. However the more you dive deeper, the less the narcosis effects you so our instructor was totally in control of everything.

The whole experience was incredible. I saw so many different types of fish - angelfish and parrot fish, surgeonfish and wrasse and butterfly fish and even a shark! It was a small reef shark swimming along the bottom, but I saw it! I also saw a turtle swimming along the bottom, but it was so far down that it was a bit blurry. The fish just swam along, not really noticing us, but we could get pretty close. On the last day I went snorkelling too, because we had to stay out of the water or on the surface for six hours to let our bodies sort out all the nitrogen we'd absorbed on the deep dive. Snorkelling was amazing because everything was so light and colourful because it was so near the surface. I saw so many different types of coral too; it was so beautiful and peaceful.

I will never be able to fully explain how much I enjoyed learning to dive and how much I can't wait to go diving again... I was completely exhausted after the course as we were up at about 6 every day and I am covered in cuts and bruises but they are good cuts and bruises :) I have just about stopped swaying about as well, just in time for the next sailing trip!

And I found Nemo about ten times!