that's what I go to school for....

You'll be pleased to hear that I'm not going to go on and on about our holiday.  We spent five days on the island of Salina, one of the Aeolian Islands just off the coast of Sicily and it was lovely.  Daft though it sounds, we don't often go on holiday just to relax, but actually that's what we did this time around.

Just look at the view from our hotel room.

Enticing enough that even we spent some time just chilling out around the pool, reading a book or just having a snooze whilst listening to "X&Y".  Coldplay certainly aren't to everyone's taste, and I don't really like much of what they've done since this album, but sat around a pool in 30 degree heat, this just hit the spot perfectly.

Salina is a pretty small island, with towns huddled around a pair of extinct volcanos.  We were staying in a lovely hotel in Malfa, and it was nice enough, but the main draw really is the ocean.  We planned to do some diving when we were there, and just look at the colour of the water.  Beautiful.

Salina is volcanic and there's very little sand on the sea bed.  What this means is that the water is crystal clear and visibility underwater is something like 30m, better than anywhere else I've been, including the Great Barrier Reef.  We dived into caves filled with shrimp; we saw a shoal of around 100 barracuda; grumpy looking eels; we swam along lava tubes; we actually saw the line where the warm top layer of water began to mingle with the colder water from the depths..... it was pretty good.  The water was so good, in fact, that we got up early a couple of times and walked the ten minutes down to the little stoney beach near our hotel for some snorkelling before breakfast (crabs, urchin, hundreds of fish, you know: the usual).

As I said, the Aeolian islands are volcanic, and several of them still have live volcanos.  This was the view from the terrace bar of our hotel, with the perfect cone of Stromboli pouring out smoke across Panarea.  We took a trip across to Stromboli during the week and hiked up to a viewing platform in time for sunset.  It was a long, hot hike, but the payoff was spectacular.

I've stood next to an active volcano before, in Ecuador, and felt the ground shaking beneath my feet.... but I've never stood on an actively erupting volcano and felt the heat from the lava as it flowed down towards the sea.  Astonishing.

Best of all was I got to spend some quality time with my wife.  She works very hard and is away from home an awful lot.  Turns out she's quite good company when she puts her mind to it.  It was a fantastic holiday.  Not even the insane Italian driver who drove us back to Catania airport at about 150km/h, the flight home delayed by three hours, the 0230 arrival home on Sunday morning or the pouring rain that greeted my cycle to the office this morning could completely ruin.

This is what you go to school for.

deep deep down...

So yeah.  We went diving.  It involved a lot of posing in wetsuits, although perhaps - on reflection - that might just have been me.

We learned to dive on the Great Barrier Reef on one of the early legs of our 2010 adventure.  We completed the basic PADI Open Water course and took a couple of steps towards the Advanced Open Water course (including the deep dive, which crucially qualifies you to dive to 30m instead of just 18m).  We've been meaning to finish off remaining couple of modules to qualify for some time, and it was only when we got to Christmas and realised that we had something ridiculous like 24 days of holiday to take before the end of March that we just took the plunge (if you'll pardon the pun) and booked a diving trip.

We've dived in all sorts of places: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Vietnam, Zanzibar... but we'd never dived in Europe.  Lanzarote is 1000km from Spain and only 100km off the coast of Morocco, but it is technically still Europe, albeit warmer.  Normally, your first choice of European diving destination would probably be the Red Sea, but the Foreign & Commonwealth office are advising that you give Egypt a miss... besides, I'm not sure how comfortable I am staying in a walled compound, no matter how safe it is, whilst the rest of the country is in turmoil.  Anyway.  Diving in the Canaries is supposed to be fantastic, with lots of volcanic features instead of reefs, so off we went.

We're not really winter sun people, but the prospect of escaping the cold for a week was pretty enticing, and I could feel myself relaxing as soon as I stepped off the plane into balmy sunshine.  The sunshine didn't really last though: the temperature was around 23C all week, but it was more often overcast than not, and without the sun, the fairly constant wind really makes it feel a little bit chilly.  Well, chilly in the sense that you'd want to wear a jumper with your shorts, anyway.   You wouldn't believe how many people we heard moaning about the weather and how cold it was.  I know they were probably there to sunbathe, but seriously these people don't know they're born!  (and they were often the same people who sought out the 2 Euro pints of Carling in the British bars.  Each to their own, but I was perfectly happy with the 2 Euro San Miguels served by Spanish people in the local bars....)

The water was a cool 18C.  Not warm, but not too bad, if you could keep warm on your surface intervals when the wind really felt a bit chilly when you're wearing damp diving gear.  Visibility underwater was good too - 15-20m - and there's loads of stuff to see: barracuda, angel shark, electric ray, grouper, sea horses, sardine, puffer fish, scorpion fish, octopus..... as well as dive-able wrecks and some pretty cool volcanic caves and arches you could explore.  It was pretty cool.

We qualified as Advanced Open Water divers after only a small hiccup involving underwater navigation with a compass - diving is all about buddy communication, you know* - but we sorted that out fairly quickly and enjoyed a few leisure dives with Cat, our instructor.  She was great, although she needed a bit of help with the underwater signalling for a seahorse, Gangnam-style, but with a bit of practice, I think she got there in the end.

[* C would want me to point out at this point that, although I now have a rattle to use underwater to get her attention, I never actually needed to use it in anger]

So yeah.  It was good.  Good diving, nice hotel (full of iron man triathletes talking about how they were planning a 200km cycle as they loaded their plate with donuts for their healthy, nutritious breakfast...the whole island is only about 70km long), good food -- apart from a hysterical interlude in the restaurant that the 1970s forgot, so bad that C joined Trip Advisor just to review it - and good company.  It was a real treat to get back to work on Monday this week, let me tell you.

Next holiday? We're off skiiing in Canada in about 4 weeks time.  Well, someone's got to do it.

ticket to the tropics....

With the diving on the reef out of the way, we now had the small matter of nine days and 1700km between us and our flight out of Brisbane to Christchurch in New Zealand. The whole aim of our trip to Tropical North Queensland had been to learn how to dive, and we were always going to play the rest of it by ear... but here it was and now we really had to work out what the hell we were going to do with our time.

One decision was easy: we’d enjoyed our campervan on the Great Ocean Road so much that it was a no-brainer to rent another one to take us down the Queensland coast. Although we'd paid for the same type of van that we had in southern Australia, this time around we were given a somewhat more muscular 4x4 version at no extra cost.  I almost felt manly up there behind the wheel of that monster.... almost..... Of course, there’s a reason that this is called Tropical North Queensland, as we were to discover on our first night out of Cairns in a campsite in Townsville, some 370km down the coast.... it’s extremely hot and humid around here, especially at this time of year. You tend not to notice this sort of thing when you’re in an air-conditioned hotel room or on a boat out on the ocean, but in an unpowered campervan..... In southern Australia, we’d got used to the camper turning from an oven to a fridge in the course of about an hour as the temperature dropped at night, and we’d been grateful for our blankets. In Queensland, we had quite a different problem: shutting the doors and windows on the van was clearly not an option, but the heat and humidity brings with it a vast array of biting insects. This is where I get lucky. Although I get plenty of bites, I would estimate for every one that I get, C. gets about 20. Over the course of the last week or so, the poor girl has been eaten alive. Even after we managed to get hold of a mosquito net, we were never able to keep the sandflies and midges at bay. It’s been carnage.

Biting insects aside, it’s been another wonderful few days. Our first stop along the way was easy, We flogged it for four hours past the banana plantations alongside the Bruce Highway out of Cairns to get down to Townsville for one simple reason: the Yongala. As soon as they learned that we were driving south, all of the Pro-Dive guys on our boat told us that we simply had to stop to dive the Yongala. The SS Yongala sank in 1911 with the loss of all 122 hands. The wreck wasn’t discovered until 1947, and wasn’t dived until 1958, by which point it had become something of an oasis for marine life in the desert of the surrounding sandy ocean floor. The wreck is almost completely intact and sits at a depth of between 16m and 30m in the ocean, making it eminently diveable. As it’s protected by Australian law as a historic site and is effectively a gravesite, you’re not allowed to penetrate the remains of the ship themselves, but you are able to get down and have a look at the ship and the incredibly diverse marine life that now surrounds it.

Our diving instructors made great play on the fact that the wreck is home to several Bull sharks, a species known to be big, curious, fearless and unpredictable, but they also told us that we should definitely go and have a look. As we now categorically had the diving bug, what else were we going to do? In the end, our trip out to the wreck taught me two things:

1) How lucky we were with conditions out on the Great Barrier Reef. There we had visibility of 20m and almost no currents. On the Yongala, we were forced to make do with visibility of 5m and some really strong currents. Having never dived in a current before, this took quite some getting used to, and meant that we spent a great deal of energy and air just trying to stay alongside the wreck. The poor visibility meant that, although we saw plenty of the ship, we didn’t see as much as we might have done. Once back on the boat after the second of our two dives, the crew told us that the currents probably meant that the Bull sharks were sheltering in lee of the boat, but just out of sight. I found that thought strangely unsettling

2) Although the company that took us out to the wreck was perfectly acceptable, it drove home how lucky we had been with Pro-Dive in Cairns, where everything was just that little bit better, from the equipment down to the guys supervising the dive.

In all, I thought it was a great day. If we go back when we’re a little more experienced and when conditions are a little easier, I’m sure we’d get more out of it.... but as things stood, it was still pretty amazing to swim around a shipwreck like that.

After Townsville, we drove on down through Queensland, pausing at Bowen before heading on down to Airlie Beach. Bowen was funny: it’s essentially a small provincial town, but ever since the film “Australia” was partially filmed there, they seem to have become starstruck. There’s a huge watercooler on the edge of town painted with the slogan “Bowenwood”, and every shop seems to have a story to tell about “Hugh and Nic” stopping to buy their sausage rolls, or somesuch. Still, I did have a nice sandwich there (chicken and avocado), so....

Airlie Beach is a different kettle of fish altogether. It’s the gateway to the Whitsunday Islands, and as such is very firmly a stop on the backpacker circuit. Most people stop here for a cruise around the 74 Islands, but as we were already chasing the clock, we only stopped to spend half a day Sea Kayaking. It’s not much time, but it was long enough to get a real feel for quite how beautiful a part of the world this is, and we got to paddle with turtles and stingrays, looking up at the sea eagles as they soared above the crystal clear waters. Our guide’s last job was in the New Zealand tourist office, so we were able to pick up lots of useful hints about the next stop in our trip. Not for the first time, we realised that we are going to have to come back to Queensland in the winter, when apparently the weather is wonderful and we’ll be able to see the wildlife at its best, including whales. One day, perhaps.

The next couple of days were a blur of driving down the Bruce Highway, watching the scenery slowly change as we moved on south. We stopped overnight at Marlborough, but were working our way towards Gympie where we had arranged to meet up with some friends. I say “friends”, but actually I’d only ever really encountered Deb via the Bookcrossing website back in about 2004. We’d exchanged a few books and seemed to get on well, and that seemed like enough of an excuse to get out of the camper for the night and to spend some time in a real bed with some real people. In the end, I was absolutely delighted that we stopped at Margaritaville to meet Deb, Jaimie, their two dogs, their chooks, their guinea fowl and their peacock. It poured with rain the whole time we were there, but the welcome was warm and it was a real treat to be able to share Deb’s birthday meal on the Saturday night and to then be treated to barbecued bacon and eggs for my birthday on the Sunday morning. It was a lovely 24 hours, and I really can’t begin to thank them enough for their hospitality. We’ll definitely be coming back here next time we’re in Queensland (that kayaking trip sounded good), but in the meantime, if you ever find yourselves in Nottingham....

Next up was Rainbow Beach and on to Fraser Island. Luckily for us, by the time we started travelling on Sunday afternoon, the weather was easing up and the roads that had been closed were now all open. By the time we reached the coast, you wouldn’t know it had been raining at all.... apart from the cloud of biting insects, that is.

Time meant that we didn’t really have all that long to explore the island, so we booked onto a two day, one night tour. The island is a UNESCO world heritage site, but as a sand island, the only way around is by 4X4 vehicles. Lots of people rent their own trucks to carry them around the island, but as I’ve never driven on sand before, I didn’t fancy that and decided to let someone else – a professional, no less - do the hard work. I can’t say that I’m sorry we did, either. It’s tough driving over there, either on the roads up into the rainforests or on 75 mile beach as you race against the tide to make your ferry. Anyway, it’s a lovely spot. We saw plenty of dingos, we swam in beautiful Lake Mackenzie, a freshwater lake perched some 80m above sealevel with the softest, clearest water and the most perfect white beaches, we climbed Indian Head to peer into the ocean to see if we could see any of the breeding colony of Tiger sharks, we cooled off in a freshwater creek (the sharks and currents make swimming in the ocean impossible), we walked in the rainforest, we drove along 75 mile beach and admired the wreck of the SS Maheno on the sands.......

I’m pretty sure that the best way to see the island is to spend a week there, camping and walking across it. We only had time for a whistlestop tour, and we spent much of that time sharing the places we stopped at with school parties and backpackers. Even so, it was a pretty cool place. Another world heritage site ticked off the list, and another reason to return to Queensland. We were very lucky with the weather too.... given the rains of 24 hours previously, we had nothing but sunshine all the time we were there. It’s a beautiful spot, and it’s actually hard to believe that the Australian government is so relaxed about letting people hire 4x4s and drive themselves around this island. That can’t be doing the environment on a sand island much good, eh? Still, it’s a lovely spot.

All that remained to us after that (and a haircut) was to flog the remaining 250km or so down to Brisbane. In all we did something like 2000km down the Queensland coast, and the time just flew by. Brisbane seems like a nice spot, a city with a proper metropolitan feel to it like Melbourne, but to be honest all I’ve really got the energy for is to have a quiet drink and to get ready for our flight out to New Zealand. The last month in Australia has been absolutely fantastic, and we seem to have managed to cram so much in that it feels like we’ve been here for a lot longer. Now though, it’s time to get ready for a somewhat colder climate and an almost complete change of scenery. South Island New Zealand, here we come.......

not much has changed but they live underwater....

Perhaps it’s a boy thing, but did you ever read the “Adventure” series of books by Willard Price? They’re a collection of children’s adventure novels, featuring a couple of teenaged naturalists called Hal and Roger Hunt, who encounter various pirates and poachers as they travel the world collecting specimens for their father’s wildlife collection. Anyway. I ripped through these books before I was a teenager, and they made a big impression on me. As well as giving me a desire to go on a proper safari in Africa, they also made me desperately want to strap an aqualung on my back and go and explore the world underneath the sea. Hal and Roger always seemed to be running into sharks and deadly rays every time they slipped beneath the waves, but even that wasn’t enough to put me off the idea.

Quite why I’ve waited until now to give diving a go, I’ll never know. I was actually given some “try scuba” type sessions as a birthday present a few years ago, but I never quite got around to it. If you’re going to learn how to dive though, where better than the Great Barrier Reef? Two of my friends have qualified as divers in the last few years, one in the Red Sea and one in a flooded quarry in England, both I’m sure were good in their own ways, but surely learning on one of the natural wonders of the world has got to be a great way to spend your time, no?

My first concern, naturally, was my health. Australia has some of the strictest medical regulations around diving in the world: if you want to dive in Australia, you must first pass an Australian dive medical. Although I was keen to spend some of our time down under learning, I didn’t want to get my hopes up until I thought I had a decent chance of actually passing the medical. I emailed a couple of diving schools in Cairns, and although both were exceptionally helpful, essentially all they were able to tell me was that I would have to see a doctor to be sure. There are two key problems with multiple sclerosis that make a dive medical problematic: the first is simply that the spread of symptoms can be so wide that it is impossible to judge how able or otherwise an individual is to dive until you have seen them with your own eyes.... you may be virtually entirely physically unaffected, or you may be unable to walk unassisted. No self-respecting doctor is going to sign anyone with MS off until they’ve had a good look at them. The second, and perhaps more thorny problem, is that some of the most common symptoms of MS are the same as some of the symptoms of decompression sickness – the Bends. DCS is what can happen when you ascend too quickly and the nitrogen in your body tries to revert to gaseous form. It can ultimately kill you, but some of the tell-tale signs that you have been affected are things like numbness, pins and needles, muscle weakness... all common MS symptoms, and all things that affect me.

On the advice of one of the dive schools, before I left the UK, I asked my MS Nurse to give me a letter confirming that I was fit and physically able. Maxine, bless her, went well above the call of duty, and wrote me a letter saying that I had run the Nottingham marathon this year and had a daily routine that consisted on 5 mile runs. None of it entirely true, but it made all the difference, as it confirmed to the doctor in Cairns that I was physically active and he didn’t just have to take my word for it. I was signed off and ready to go. Actually, as it turned out, C had much greater difficulty than me with her medical, and her occasional asthma was very nearly a show-stopper. Luckily (and I think it was down to luck) the doctor asked her to sign a disclaimer saying that she was aware of the risks, and then he signed her off... and we were ready to start our training.

At this juncture, serendipity took hold of our destiny. We were all set to go with one company (one of the ones that had been so helpful over email), when we dropped into an independent travel agency next to their office to enquire about another Wicked Camper to take us down the Queensland Coast. Andy at Experience Cairns was, as it turns out, something of an expert on diving in the area, and he listened to what we wanted to do, warned us against the company we were going to go with, and suggested we try Pro-Dive in Cairns. With nothing much to lose and no particular preference, we took his advice, and were picked up early the next morning to commence our pool training and our theory lessons.

What can I say: Pro-Dive were superb. Our class consisted of a bunch of Swedes, a couple of dutch guys, a Czech and another English girl, and our instructor – Janine – was originally from Leeds but had been in Oz for something like 9 years. It was brilliant. For the first couple of days, we alternated the theory in the classroom with skills sessions in the pool. Before that first day, I had never once in my life been underwater with a tank of air on my back, but before the end of the second day, I actually thought I knew what I was doing. On the end of the second day, we all sat the PADI Open Water exam. You needed 75% to pass, and I got 49/50 and C got 50/50 (although to this day I will dispute that the answer I gave to question#39 was just as valid....and besides, she revised and everything). In fact, the whole class passed, and so we all boarded the boat the next morning to spend the next three days on the Great Barrier Reef.

The transfer from Cairns to the reef is something like 3 hours, and for the first day and a half out there, we completed our Open Water certification by demonstrating our skills in the water – skills like clearing your mask underwater, showing you have control of your buoyancy, showing you have some basic navigation skills.... nothing too complicated, but all the fundamental basics that any diver should understand. Once certified, we were able to dive without an instructor, but were also given the option of completing our PADI Adventure Diver certification whilst on the reef: basically this entailed another couple of supervised dives, including a deep dive to 30m (the Open Water qualification enables you to dive to 18m, and that extra 12m can make a big difference if you want to dive wrecks and things like that.)

 Our instructor, Janine, shows off her muscles by throttling me...

It’s hard to explain how brilliant these few days were. The weather was perfect: the water was calm, visibility was a constant 20m and a steady 29 degrees; the company was good too... but above all, I was learning a new skill and was immediately able to apply it in an incredibly beautiful environment. We were warned, before reaching the reef, that often people are disappointed when it doesn’t live up to some of those amazing photos and film footage that we’ve all seen of all those colourful fish. The truth is that it probably doesn’t, but it is still AWESOME. Nothing can really prepare you for getting up close and personal with such an incredible diversity of marine life: parrotfish, huge bass, a 150 year old turtle the size of a dinner table, squid, clown anemone fish (Nemo!), many and varied types of coral, batfish, eagle rays, maori wrasse the size of dogs..... and sharks. Ah, sharks. We’ve all seen Jaws, and the shark is the one fish that still summons up a kind of primal fear. We are, after all, lower on the foodchain than some of these guys. The truth, of course, is that you are extremely unlikely to be attacked by any shark, and even less likely to be attacked by the ones we were going to see on the reef. Even so, there was something incredibly thrilling when we saw our first White Tipped Reef sharks on our first dive after qualifying. They weren’t especially big, but I saw the pair of them basking on the sand during the heat of the day, and all I wanted to do was to get closer. One swam away, but we got to within about 2m of the other before he got tired of us and moved away a little to try and sleep.

careful, the wind might change....

Later on that same day, we went on a night dive. Sharks during the day are one thing, but they are essentially nocturnal hunters, and seeing them after dark was going to be a completely different kettle of fish. Our pre-dive briefing warned us that there was a chance that we could encounter bigger, more dangerous sharks like Bull sharks or Tiger sharks.  Both are fearless, aggressive and curious, and if we did meet them, there was a chance they could come and have a closer look at us.  In those circumstances, we were taught to form the "ring of steel", in a circle with our backs to the shark and to descend.  The idea is that sharks attack from below, so going deeper makes that harder for them, and if they come to have a closer look (i.e. quick taste) of you, then you are presenting your back to them and they'll get a mouthful of your tank.... we were told partially in jest, of course, but it was enough to give us pause for thought before getting into the water, that's for damn sure.  As it turned out, I actually jumped into the water when I could already see sharks circling, and I was happy to..... my fear was overwhelmed by my excitement at seeing these magnificent animals at close quarters. Night diving is strange and creepy simply because you can only see what your torch is illuminating, and if you’re at the back of the line, you have very little idea of what’s behind you. It’s also the time of day when much of the reef flora and fauna comes out to play and can be seen at its best. Most, I’m afraid, was lost on me, as I was far too wrapped up in the sensation of diving in the dark to pick up the finer detail. On the way back to the boat, we saw a few Grey Reef Whaler sharks on the prowl. One was at least 2m long – bigger than me – and whilst it was exciting to see a shark up close that afternoon, to see one cruising around looking for something to eat was even more thrilling

Sexy stinger suit

It was an awesome, awesome few days. Our instructor was brilliant, the boat was good and the guys I was diving with were fun. All in all, one of the best weeks of my life, I reckon. Turns out that I quite like diving too. Yeah, I’ve got lots to learn and my big lungs guzzle up my air far too quickly, but I think that I’ve picked up a new hobby.

Just brilliant. If I do nothing else whilst I'm away, then this alone makes the whole trip worthwhile. Plus I now have the wherewithal to dive with dolphins and seals in New Zealand, Orca in Canada... the underwater world is suddenly my oyster.