This was a photography tour, so I have a lot of pictures to show you! You’ve probably already seen some on Facebook or Instagram but I did try to pick slightly different ones for these posts.
Day 1
Scott dropped me off at the airport very early in the morning for my flight to Perth, which was quite delayed because some dude decided he was too sick to fly just as we were taxiing to the runway to take off. Not sure why he couldn’t have decided that 15 minutes before when the door was still open. Then the connection in Perth was very confusing because despite Christmas Island being part of Australia, I still had to go to the International Departures area of the airport which had identical gate numbers but was in a completely different area. And I really wasn’t sure if my bag was going to go through automatically because the check-in person in Melbourne said it would but every single sign in Perth said it wouldn’t. In the end everything was fine.
Christmas Island is a 3.5 hour flight NNW of Perth, almost all the way to Indonesia. Our hosts Chris and Alex met us at the airport where we finally found out who was going to be on our tour (I had been eyeing everyone on the flights, haha). We drove the scenic way to our hotel for the week, stopping to hold crabs on the side of the road.
We dropped our bags at the hotel (appropriately named The Sunset), and then went to the info center to have drinks and snacks on the patio before watching a Welcome To Christmas Island slideshow presentation. Then a roast dinner in a park and early to bed because we were all exhausted from travel and had to be up for sunrise the next morning!
Day 2
We got up just after sunrise for a photoshoot down by the pier in town. There were a few Brown Noddy on the rocks.
We went to The Pink House where they are breeding extinct blue-tailed skinks and Listers Geckos and listened to a semi-depressing, but informative talk about Christmas Island conservation.
In the afternoon we went snorkeling! No pics because my GoPro leaked and killed the memory card. The snorkeling was pretty great. The water is very warm and very clear, and the reef is right off the end of the pier. The water was a little choppy this day but I still saw a lot of cool fish. Chris taught me how to duck dive.
Red-tailed Tropicbird just outside our hotel.
Epic sunset photoshoot. It just kept getting better and better!
Day 3
This was a big day with a lot of crabs.
We hiked down to Greta Beach, which unfortunately collects a ton of garbage from Indonesia every single day. It was quite confronting to see all the junk. Why were they so many flip flops? They didn’t even seem broken.. are people just losing them? It made me never want to buy anything plastic or rubber ever again. We collected about 70kg of trash but it barely made a dent.
After that we went on another hike to Dolly Beach. It was a longer walk but it’s sooo beautiful and we had the whole beach to ourselves. Actually almost everywhere we went on CI we were the only people there. It’s not a swimming beach but there was a big tide pool that you could go in, which I severely regretted not wearing my bathing suit for.
The coolest part of Dolly Beach was the Coconut Crabs!! Chris cracked a coconut and over the next hour or so a dozen huge crabs emerged out of the jungle to have a snack. It was so awesome to see them all pulling at the coconut and crawling all over the place. I love how they’re all different colours.. the blue ones were my favourite.
Christmas Island White-eye. So cute! We also saw Christmas Island Thrushes and Christmas Island Imperial Pigeons.
Then on the way back we stopped at the bird hospital. There weren’t any birds being treated at the moment, but some of the old patients come back for free food. It was a good chance to see the Red-footed Boobies and various Frigatebirds (mostly juveniles) up very close and get some great bird portraits.
We had dinner at the local pub that night. I’m glad all our food and drinks were included in the tour (buy once cry once) because a parma costs $37 on Christmas Island! (They can’t grow food on CI because of all the crabs so they have to fly everything in.)