The Great Barrier Reef

There's one more thing that I want to share before I move onto my adventures in New Zealand, The Great Barrier Reef. This is somewhere I've been longing to visit my whole life as I'm sure many others have. To experience the bustling life of the coral reef first hand and feel a part of a living, breathing underwater ecosystem.

When you hear the name of this place, you expect it to look like this..
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Or this...

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You know like Finding Nemo

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Just look at those colours!

Well the truth is that tourist companies do whatever they can to lure you in. Just like I lured you in by putting the most colourful picture first.

The Coral in The Great Barrier Reef is more of a dull shade. They call it "brown coral" and it's not supposed to be really bright and colourful like everyone thinks.

The Great Barrier Reef was my first time ever scuba diving outside of a pool. I was super exited to do it in such a reknown location of the world! I travelled all the way from the United Kingdom to experience the bustling life that awaited me to find this...

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What you see here is me on one of the most "popular" tours of the great barrier reef. It's the remains of what once was a natural beauty. A graveyard of broken coral litering the floor.

"The further you go out, the more you'll see" everyone will tell you, because the polution from mankind has destroyed this beauty.

Well, we were on the boat for about an hour before we reached the first diving sight so wern't exactly close to the mainland.

That's not to say I didn't see anything. I did!

(With the help of some fish bait)

To be honest, not long before I visited, a big Cyclone "Debbie" swept across the North East Coast of Australia and was partly to blame but I knew this wasn't the main cause.

I refused to accept this was all that was left so a week later, I went out again on a much cheaper and less known family tour to Franklin Island. This experiwnce was much different and I'm gutted I didn't have a camera at the time because for the first time in my life I swam with Turtles!

The reef in this particular location was way better but the Island was deserted and we were the only people there..15 of us. We had the Island to ourselves and not one bit of rubbish was left behind. It was spottless.

I knew this was a rare occasion though and I was extremelly lucky to stumble upon such a cheap deal. It's sad to think what the rest of the reef could be like had we humans not destroyed it through Greed and Lazyness throwing our shit in the ocean without a care, leaving our rubbish on the beach because we're too fat and lazy to find a bin.

If you have seen Blue Planet 2 you will know exactly what I'm on about but most people won't care. If it doesn't effect them personally they don't care. A bit like terrorism...as long as the people massacred arn't related then it doesn't matter. Those people make me sick and if I see any in person I'll gladly kick the shit out of them.

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But back to the reef, you see I **have** been there, I **have** experienced it and it's heartbreaking to see the reality. When you get back to the shore, you look at the next people gearing up at the shop knowing what they're about to go through.

If you live on this planet, you are either part of the problem or part of the sollution. Think carefully about your actions and what they could lead to. This world needs your help in order to survive and you need it, in order to survive.

1 person may not make alot of difference but a billion people thinking the same thing will.

In a gentle way, you can Shake the world. - Mahatma Ghandi.