QLD - Kurunda (Cairns)

After some umming and ahhing, we decided to take a day trip to Kuranda rain forest. It turned out that this wasn’t the best day to do this trip, as it was Melbourne Cup day. The Melbourne Cup is a horse race, much the same as the Grand national in the UK, except its always mid-week and the Auzzies use it as an excuse to have the arvo off work and go down the pub;) So, unfortunately, we missed this part of Australian culture ;)



To start the journey, we took a cable car over the rain forest. This goes pretty high, and every now and again jolts, which gave Evelyn heart palpitations every few minutes or so. We shared our first car with another couple, and this old guy was more petrified than Evelyn ;)



It was a beautiful ride to our first stop. We got some great views of Cairns bay, the rain forest on the side of the mountain, and there was a deafening noise from the sound of the cicadas in the trees (cricket type things). It was also cool to see the rain forest canopies from above, and we caught a glimpse of a few of the birds we couldn't see from the forest floor.



We had 3 interchanges on the rise, where we could get out and look around the rain forest and take a few snaps of a pretty dam, which leads into a waterfall. The rain forest itself, wasn’t really as we expected it to be as it was very dry, and not really much moisture or humidity in the air. It is coming to the end of the dry season, and into the wet, and it would be interesting to see the forest again in a month or so when its wet, just to see the difference. We’re happy with the sunshine right now though ;)

The final leg of our ride, took us over a river and into Kurunda. Our leaflet told us that crocs could be spotted in this river, but we didn’t see any. We took a little walk along the river after lunch, and again saw nothing (not that we were hoping to) so not too sure there are any around ;)



Kuranda itself, seems to be a town made purely for tourists, with loads of arts and craft shops, market stalls, mango wine, gourmet ice cream (which we both spilt down our t-shirts;), koala wildlife park, creepy crawly zoo, and this really amazing art shop, with excellent photos of the area. We didn’t do the koalas or creepies, as they were quite expensive.

As it turned out the highlight of the Kuranda, was the least advertised thing, and we found it purely by accident after our river/rain forest walk. We stumbled upon a flying fox (fruit bat) sanctuary, which was really cool. The lady running the place does so off her own back, and rescues injured bats, and cares for the babies. We got to see these bats really close, and the babies were really cute (well as cute as bats can be – and Ev said it had the face of a baby pig – much to the dislike of the owner) We found out that these bats have better eyesight than humans and can see in colour too, which we later thought was quite amusing as we saw some bats caught between power lines, so they’re not that clever ;)





Our trip back to Cairns was by steam train, so we got another perspective of the rain forest. It was a nice ride; we saw some good views of the valleys, waterfalls, and the dam. The excitement of the day was all too much for Marc though as he fell asleep on the train home ;)