A Green Island Tour: Visiting the Great Barrier Reef with Young Kids
Pretty much all trips to the Great Barrier Reef will require you to take an organized tour. We chose a tour run by Big Cat Reef Cruises out of Cairns, which took us on a cruise to a remote island in the inner reef for the day. While we did not have a great experience on this specific tour, and would not recommend Big Cat tours to others for a variety of reasons we won’t get into here, we still feel that the Great Barrier Reef itself is absolutely a must-do when visiting northern Queensland.
The reef is a quintessential destination for families with kids visiting the Cairns or Port Douglas area. However, where you go on the reef and what you are able to do while you are there will greatly affect how you experience it. Our kids are still a bit too young for open-sea snorkelling or scuba diving, which is the main activity for most people visiting the reef, so our options when it came to tours were a bit more limited than others’ might be. Our number one priority when visiting the reef was to experience the wildlife both above and below the water — so we chose to visit Green Island, which is home to a small nature reserve, where we could swim from the beach (or so we thought) and take a glass-bottom boat ride to view the reef and the wildlife living around it.
Unfortunately, we were not impressed with the wildlife we saw at Green Island — the glass-bottom boat tour around the island organized through Big Cat was only a few minutes long, and left much to be desired. There were very few fish swimming about, and the portion of the reef we saw showed clear signs of decay, with the coral mostly blanched and broken. And the wildlife on Green Island itself consisted pretty much entirely of aggressive birds that attack you if you happen to have food in your hands (and whose guano makes the entire island smell like a pet shop).
The island also doesn’t have much to do to pass the time if you aren’t snorkelling — there were a few nice paths through the forest that took about 10 minutes to walk and led to gorgeous remote beaches, a small crocodile exhibit (which requires a separate ticket), and a pool for the exclusive use of hotel guests and clients of one specific tour company (not ours, unfortunately!). And due to the presence of box jellyfish, you can’t swim off the beaches on Green Island unless you’re wearing a stinger suit. Most people opt to rent snorkelling equipment, which gives you use of a stinger suit and gives you a bit more to do during your time there, but unfortunately our kids were a bit too young for that this time.
On the plus side, the two-hour boat cruise (each way) from Cairns to Green Island offered spectacular views of the ocean and the coastline around Cairns, and the kids loved the fish-feeding demonstration from the back of the boat at the end of our visit to Green Island. We even got to see a few sea turtles swimming around the jetty!
All in all, we would highly recommend a visit to the Great Barrier Reef, but would suggest avoiding Big Cat as a tour operator and would likely recommend a visit to one of the purpose-built viewing platforms in the outer reef instead of Green Island.
Cost: We spent around 175 USD for our full-day tour for our family of 4, which included transfer cruises to and from Green Island and about five hours on the island.