One With the Fish

I’ve left mainland Australia behind for aquamarine water, a rocking boat, and real-life Finding Nemo, stepping between worlds into an endless technicolor aquarium. It’s like someone’s gone and mashed up Avatar and Candyland, then transported the entire end result underwater. If the Beatles had been aquatically-minded when they wrote Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, I imagine the end result would have been something like the Great Barrier Reef.

I spend a grand total of three days and four nights on the boat. I team up with a pair of brothers from the UK– on a side trip from yet another brother’s wedding– to explore, diving and surfacing and diving and surfacing, watching the sun rise over aqua water and send blazing rays through torrential black banded storms as it sets. Far out on the horizon, a little island called Australia waits for us.

I watch three-meter moray eels dart into cover and wrap themselves all the way around massive coral trees. I weave my way around the stem of a coral three times as tall as myself affectionately referred to as the “Magic Mushroom,” having reached its current height through a growth rate of a single centimeter each year.

Fluorescent underwater castles rise in fans and shelves and trees and brain corals and spiney things. We explore systems big enough to swim through arches and lose ourselves in. Clownfish hide in pink anemonies sprawling over a meter wide. Orange and white fish ring fluorescent blue coral like halos. Orange boulder coral rises in systems as large as houses, and blue Christmas tree worms retreat in haste as our fingers flutter near them in the current. Nearby, white coral sprawls like a halfhazard bramble groundcover beneath thousands of shimmering blue fish. Orange trumpet fish flutter amongst vine-like systems. A turtle gnaws happily at algae just below the water’s surface, its golden shell’s intricate patterns glowing in the afternoon sun.

Sometimes, I look around I realize I can’t see a single patch of rock or sand as the coral spreads before me in an organized, yet chaotic masterpiece of an ancient, abstract garden.

Bommies– coral-covered formations–– rise from the sea floor complete with walls and nooks and crannies full of life. Schools of parrot fish the size of small humans glom their laid-back way through the water like they’re high out of their minds. Sea turtles sleeping in rocky pockets wake to follow us out and around the reef before tucking back into bed. Schools of thousands of fish dart through the coral, flicking shimmering bodies into shadows to claim refuge.

On occasion we drop to muted blue depths where the surface disappears from above us. Near the bottom of a sheet wall we find an odd, crusty rusty-colored shell of coral rising 10 meters from the sandy sea floor, having grown over and killed its host as the ocean’s eerie version of a strangler fig.

Despite close proximity, sandy expanses between reefs and walls hold an entirely different ecosystem. Stingrays glide across the ocean floor. Sea cucumbers as long as myself sprawl without apparent pattern, coiled waste marking their path across the sand. Lonely clams over 200 years old sit solo in broad patches, neon green spots accenting deep purple flesh inside monster shells. As we kneel beside them, we look all the way through to find stripy blue fish claiming shelter amongst the clams’ milky white insides.

Bramble-like coral forms low spikey, forests glowing even in the daylight as if backlit from within, brightening the sea floor in powder blue, cotton-candy pink and an eerie sea-green tinted with the barest yellow accent. In too many places, though, these utopias have turned to dull white, bleaching causing them to lose their color as they’ve expelled the algae living amongst them in a symbiotic relationship. When we ghost over these areas, somehow I feel like I’ve been tossed into the Lion King’s hyena graveyard.

By morning, lone barracuda and white-tipped reef sharks patrol the water.

By night, the world turns alien. We attach glow sticks to our tanks for night dives, identifying our buddies by fluorescent pink and blue floating along in the darkness above our backs. Giant red bass, kings of the reef by night, flick in and out of our headlamps en masse. (Our dive supervisor jokes that if we’re really desperate to play god, we can point the bass toward a snack by shining our lights on little fish hiding in the coral. Then again, we can also move our lights at the very last moment and watch the bass crash head-first in the ground.)

We leave the boat’s lights behind to find that full moon shines overhead, providing a rippling sheen on the water’s surface. We kick forward and follow our compasses blindly around bommies through the dark until we find a broad, low cave beneath the coral. Inside the cave we find Brian, a 140-year-old green sea turtle the size of my kitchen table, snoozing his way through the night. Soon enough his girlfriend, Brianna, descends out of the dark behind to shuffle and flip sand onto her two-meter shell before we return to the boat. 

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Josh and I head north from Cairns in the last two days of my week off, after a somewhat self-vindicating argument in which I stand my own against a car rental agent who seems to firmly believe in my inability to speak Vehicle due to my status as a 5’2” American girl.

Our route twists along the coast beneath the area’s highlands, passing rocky points piled with thousands of cairns atop jagged rocks where they jut upwards from the shore over the sea.

The air hangs thick with humidity in the Daintree, one of the world’s most complex and primitive rainforests. As we drive our van onto the ferry to cross the Daintree River, I remember a funny conversation I overheard on the boat: "If you try to swim across this river, you will not make it out alive. The crocodiles will eat you. Also there are hundreds of bull sharks. Also this is where the irukandji spawn."

Once we enter the national park proper, our road winds through the jungle to overlooks from which we peer over mountains cloaked in jungle as they swoop down to meet curling white beaches at the sea. Cassowaries with neon-blue heads pick their way through litter and trees beside the road on our way to the fruit farm where we’ve booked in for the night.

In the evening we wander hundreds of mangosteen trees in the dimming light and return to our cabana just in time to beat a furious, deafening downpour. The trees and leaves here are so thick that it’s impossible to tell when the rain has stopped. For an hour after, as we barbeque kebabs and capsicum and onion and eggplant, water still patters to the forest floor from tree to leaf to vine to soft ground.

In the morning, Josh and I find our way through the farm’s jungle creek to a waterhole sheltered by a monster buttressed tree before picking our way through a mile of tangled vines and palms.  

Warnings en masse await us as we duck into a beach before beginning our trip home, announcing stingers and crocodiles and… pretty much everything feisty in the world, actually. The beach itself, however, sweeps in a broad white arc to end in dense mangrove forests, where tree trunks and roots form a sturdy lattice atop the soft sand. Sun streams down through the canopy of the surrounding jungle to catch bright yellow blossoms hanging from trees, and a single crimson trunk stands out amongst the shadows…

We take one more look around before leaving the beach behind, returning to the land of return plane flights and work.