where the wild things are So, you’re a bucket list fanatic? Pick a number: five, 10, 101 things or more. The possibilities are endless when it comes to ticking off a “To Do” list on the Great Barrier Reef – an icon that tops its own list as the largest World Heritage Area on the planet. Enough said. For the ultimate bucket list of activities, look no further than where the richest concentration of wild things are.
Map your adventure: The Great Barrier Reef promises a whole lot of something for every visitor, whether a drool-factor luxury escape or windswept sailing, eco-adventure, lip-biting adrenalin rush or opportunity to dive into the realworld set of “Finding Nemo”, packed with more than 1,600 fish species. The only conundrum is where to start. First up, it’s important to mentally step through the Reef’s five distinct experience precincts: the Wild North – Cape York and Torres Strait (marine wilderness expeditions); Cairns and Port Douglas (adventure and adrenaline); Townsville North Queensland (history and learning); Whitsundays and Mackay (stylish island resorts and sailing); and Southern Great Barrier Reef (uncrowded getaway). Then, pack for every adventure. You won’t regret it. Great expectations: You know you’re onto a great thing when Sir David Attenborough says it’s “the most 58 / AUTUMN/WINTER 202 1
magical thing you ever saw in your life” and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation trips over its superlatives when defining the Reef’s outstanding universal value, topping all four natural criteria to make the World Heritage List. The traveller’s bible, Lonely Planet, in its Ultimate Travelist ranked the Great Barrier Reef at No. 2 in the world’s mustsee 500 destinations, behind Cambodia’s Temples of Angkor, but ahead of Peru’s Machu Picchu, The Great Wall of China and India’s Taj Majal. While these are all man-made wonders, the Great Barrier Reef, as the largest structure ever built by living things (and the only one visible from outer space), is the work of billions of tiny organisms, known as coral polyps and has evolved over millennia. Bucket List #1 – Pay it forward: Help keep the ‘Great’ in the Great Barrier Reef by signing up to citizen science projects and reef research encounters, not to mention taking action to adopt environmentally-
friendly initiatives at home. A good place to start is Townsville’s Reef HQ Great Barrier Reef Aquarium, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s (GBRMPA) state-of-theart education centre, which last year scooped TripAdvisor’s Travellers’ Choice Award for the second year running. Home to the world’s largest living coral reef aquarium, the centre also manages a turtle hospital, showing first-hand how human-created problems, like marine debris, can have a fatal impact. Out on the Southern Great Barrier Reef, Lady Elliot Island Eco Resort is as close as you’ll get to a carbon-neutral model, offering behind-the-scenes tours of its “green” infrastructure. The resort generates its own power, desalinates seawater for drinking, maintains a wastewater treatment plant, recycles and stopped selling bottled drinking water in 2012. It also developed the first dedicated Climate Change Trail and Tour.
