Grated Expectations

Last couple days.

Day 7

This day we switched with the other group. Boat Team went out on Hama’s boat to go snorkeling in four different locations. The first one was in a big cave (Hama was telling us about all sorts of crazy caves underneath Christmas Island.. they sound incredible. Some you have to scuba dive to get to, but then there are beaches INSIDE THE ISLAND). The second was over a shipwreck that has been reclaimed by coral and looks very interesting, and the third was just a place with epic coral and fish, very accessible. Saw a reef shark pretty close. When we stopped at the fourth stop I could see something dark in the water and Chris and Hama were telling me to get in quick, then they were throwing food into the water and like 20 HUUUUGE Giant Trevally were all around me. It was so cool. They’re like 1 meter long and THICC!

On the way back Hama dangled a orange float on a rope out the back of the boat and lots of boobies and juvenile frigatebirds came down to look at it. It was really cool and fun to try and get pictures while also trying to hang onto the boat.

They use these signs to help control the traffic during the crab migration.

After showers and lunch we went to look at this enormous strangler fig. You can go inside of it! There were tons of crabs in the forest. And tons of mosquitos. I did not stop moving.

We ended up at the Blowholes boardwalk at sunset. Funny how everything was perfectly timed to get epic photos eh? :D Because the whole island is made of limestone there are blowholes all along the coast. Hard to capture in a picture how neat it was. I love a good geological feature.

That evening we had a special fish dinner back by the pool at the hotel. Alex showed us the trip video that she had been secretly making of us the whole time… it was such a sweet surprise. Part 1. Part 2.

Day 8

Up before dawn again, why not, for one last sunrise shoot, this time at Margaret Knoll lookout. My sunrise pictures are a bit meh but we got some great last wildlife shots.

Abbott’s Booby. They sure didn’t seem endangered with how many were flying over! But this is one of the only places to see them. Very special.

Christmas Island Flying Fox. LOOK HOW CUTE HE IS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can’t get over it. How lucky that they fly around in the daylight there and I happened to have my camera ready when this one flew RIGHT OVER US. This is my luckiest photo of the trip.

The elusive Golden Bosun. Quite far away again but I just like the composition of this photo.

A very curious juvenile Christmas Island Frigatebird checking us out.

Then we had a hot breakfast of bacon and eggs down by the pier, which tasted especially delicious after so many breakfasts of of thin white bread with Vegemite the other days.

Our last excursion was going to The Dales to see the blue crabs. They’re really cute, and really blue!

We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant and then we had a bit of time in town to buy souvenirs and snacks for the way home.

It’s not easy to live on Christmas Island!

The flight back to Perth stops on Cocos Island first, which adds another 1.5 hours onto the trip. I had my own row though so I was able to lie down. Cocos looks crazy from the air, it’s like a ring of teeny tiny islands with a lagoon in the middle. And we somehow landed an airplane there. I was surprised how many people got off and on.

Our flight was pretty delayed so I didn’t get to my hotel in Perth until like 2AM. It was very comfortable though (woohoo, good use of Qantas points) and I slept in very late. Then I spent the day wandering around Perth, dodging rain and looking for new birds. I only managed to see Western Wattlebird, and a couple Red-tailed Black Cockatoo, but no pics of either. I took myself out for a nice sushi dinner and then went back to the hotel for another big sleep. Finally the next day I took the train to the airport (so easy!) and flew back to Melbourne.

Overall the trip was extremely super awesome. I had a great time and saw so much cool stuff. I feel really lucky that I got to see Christmas Island as it is now, pretty much untouched by tourism. It’s such a beautiful place I’m sure it’ll get discovered/ruined some day. Chris’s tour was awesome and I hope I’m lucky enough to be able to go on another one of his some day.

Day 4

Big bird day.

We got up at dawn again to drive to Lily & Ethel Beach where tons of Brown Boobies nest in the crags of the limestone. The boobies were quite calm and we could get some great portraits from a couple meters away, as long as you could navigate the extremely pointy bits of rock. I love how funny the boobies look front on.

Then we drove to a different place where Red-footed Boobies nest in the trees on the side of the road. They were active all around us collecting bits of twigs and branches to build up their nests.

We also went to a museum full of all sorts of artefacts showing the history of Christmas Island, which mostly revolves around mining phospate.

After that we went to one of my favourite parts of the trip. We walked into a dam on one of Chris’s friends property where frigatebirds swoop down to get water. Frigatebirds are seabirds but they’re not actually waterproof so they can’t sit on the water to rest or catch fish. Instead they have to sleep while they’re flying, harass other birds into throwing up their food so they can eat it, and drink on the wing. Crazy eh!

A dozen or so frigatebirds would circle around and around until one of them decided to drink. Then the rest would also decide to drink too for a few minutes, and then you’d have to wait a bit for the next cycle to start. This was not an easy thing to photograph as they are quite fast. Eventually we kind of figured out that the once the first bird cleared a little patch in the algae then the other birds would probably drink from there too, so you could kind of try to focus on that spot. I took at least 300 photos and only 1 or 2 are any good. Most of them don’t even have a bird in the frame haha.

I also got tons of mosquito bites and tore up my legs running through the sharp grass, but it was worth it, it was seriously magical.

It was always exciting to see a frigatebird with its pouch all blown up (to attract the ladies).

Sadly there was a waterlogged frigatebird stuck in the dam when we got there, but Chris did a dramatic bird rescue with a very long pole and we managed to get it out. He held it in his lap in the car and we brought it back to the bird hospital to dry out. A heroic mission!

By this point I was quite tired. But the day is not over! We drove to Swell Lodge, Chris’s luxury eco-lodge on the West side of the island (in the National Park), for a sticky-beak and for drinks and snacks on the patio. There are only two cabins and they are super super private. If you stay there you get all your food cooked by a private chef and your own private tour guide who will take you to do anything you want on the island. If you can afford to stay there, it would be an unforgettable holiday.

I sipped my champagne while reclining on a deck chair and pretended I was a guest for an hour.

Then we had a BBQ dinner in a park where Chris found us a Giant Gecko (not actually very big) to photograph (with our phones!). We also tried to call in a Hawk Owl but it didn’t work.

Day 5

The next day we went snorkeling again in the cove. The conditions were perfect, it was great. We went all the way out to the drop off again.

We ate a few of our lunches in this one park that often had Golden Bosuns flying over. Golden Bosuns are a really special Christmas Island bird. So I would quickly eat my (delicious) sandwich (with 15 different toppings) and chug 4 glasses of juice/cold water so I could get my camera back out and try to get a good picture of the bosun. It was so hard!! I think Kerryn and Trish and I were a bit addicted to trying. This one turned out ok but it’s pretty heavily cropped.

I think that afternoon some people had their 1-on-1 sessions and the others had some Free Time for the first time, which was needed! That night we went to the golf course lookout to try to photograph flying birds and then we had dinner at a pub called Rumah Tinggi with live music. We all had steak sandwiches and drinks, it was a lovely evening.

Day 6

We split up into two groups. I was on Land Team.

First we went to The Sitting Room, where there were a few nesting Red-tailed Tropicbirds under the bushes, including this one with a lil chick. Omg so fluffy!!!! Again we could get pretty great portraits… all the animals on CI are so chill.

A juvenile Brown Booby derp.

Then we went to The Grotto which is this awesome little cave that you can swim in! So fun!! We tried to do a little bouldering, but I was terrible at it (sorry Rosemarie). I really liked The Grotto.

We went to a lookout where Chris had to go on the outside of the barrier and hack away at the ever-growing jungle to reveal the view. It was somewhat stressful to watch.

After lunch we had more 1-on-1 sessions with Chris or Alex. I used mine to get Alex to show me how she makes her cool videos and reels and stories for Instagram. She showed me tons of great tips and ideas which I have not practiced yet. I really should do that.

We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I loved it because we ordered so many different things and I got to try it all. Some of the ladies thought it was too exotic, haha.

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.)