Travel Guides

Whale sharks in March, minke whales in June, coral spawning in November — when you visit the Great Barrier Reef determines what you see. Here's the full month-by-month guide.

The Great Barrier Reef is 2,300 kilometres of reef, islands, and ocean. Here's the framework for planning a trip that matches what you actually want to experience.

Reef travel with children is one of the most rewarding versions of the trip and one of the most logistically complex. The rewards are real: children who encounter the reef at formative ages develop relationships with the marine environment that…

Reef photography travel presents a specific version of a universal problem: the gap between what you see and what your camera records. In almost any other landscape, the gap is manageable — daylight, stable platforms, and subjects that don’t move…

Scuba diving is a physiologically demanding activity conducted in an environment that is hostile to human survival without equipment. This is not a reason to avoid it — the equipment works, the training prepares you, and millions of dives are…

The Great Barrier Reef is not difficult to get to from Australia. From everywhere else, it requires some planning, but the infrastructure is well-developed, the connections are numerous, and the logistics, once understood, are more straightforward than the destination’s remoteness…

Tourism is both one of the most powerful economic arguments for protecting the Great Barrier Reef and one of the most direct sources of damage to it. The GBR generates approximately $6.4 billion annually and supports 64,000 jobs. It is…

Weather around coral reef islands rarely behaves exactly the way forecasts suggest. Even when meteorological reports predict clear skies and calm seas, local conditions can shift throughout the day in subtle ways. The islands themselves influence wind direction, cloud formation,…

This is the guide I wish had existed when I first started planning reef trips. It doesn’t replace the detailed articles elsewhere on this site — the specific dive site guides, the island articles, the seasonal timing breakdowns — but…

Solo reef travel is, in my experience, significantly better than its reputation suggests and somewhat more complicated than its advocates admit. The diving community has a complex relationship with solo diving — the standard open-water certification teaches the buddy system…