Australia - Day 7, Kuranda

Got into Cairns (pronounced 'cans') late Wednesday & took the shuttle from the airport to my motel. It's a self-contained apartment style room half a block from the beach & about a 10 minute drive from the heart of Cairns. I spent Thursday walking around, finding all the stores, getting some food, & spent a little bit of time on the beach. Cairns reminds me a lot of Hawaii. You have the city on the coast, with sugar cane fields & mountainous rain forest surrounding it.

Today, I took the scenic railroad up to Kuranda, which is an old hippie town in the World Heritage rain forest just north of Cairns and which now mainly draws in tourists. The whole trip is narrated & there are some really beautiful shots of the valley & coastline. The train goes

through 15 tunnels & over however many bridges & stops at Barron Falls for pictures. In Kuranda itself, there is the Koala Gardens, Bird World, Butterfly sanctuary & the venom zoo. I just went to the Koala Garden, where the main attraction is being able to hold & have your picture taken with a koala; and to Bird World, where you can hand feed numerous exotic & indigenous birds, including the Cassowary, which is endangered (although you don't get to feed it). I thought it was odd that this was the first place I had seen a Galah, since we used to get flocks of them in our back yard in Canberra. Other than those things there really isn't a whole lot to do other than shop & eat.

I did get an original Aborigine picture & got to take a photo with the artist, who I swear looked like he was 90. According to some of the newspaper clippings, he actually traveled to Amsterdam in the 80's to show some of his art. I also had scones with jam & clotted cream & tea for lunch.

I took the Skyrail back down. Thankfully, the weather was perfect going up, because it started raining on the way down & I really couldn't see anything. How is it that whenever I go to a place that is suppose to have fantastic (the

same thing happened when Mom & I drove the Ring of Kerry in Ireland the first time). At one point on the skyrail, I had to get off to get on the next leg of it & took ashort tour around the platform with a ranger telling us about all the indigenous trees in the rain forest. That particular stretch of rain forest has a 400-500 year old Kauri Pine which isconsidered to be a living fossil since it is one of the oldest pre-historic flowering plants in the world. And that pretty much concluded my day.

I'm going to see if I can arrange a snorkel trip to the outer reef for Mon or Tues, but with cyclone Uluri sitting off the coast, I'm not too optimistic. We aren't getting the brunt of the cyclone this far north, but it's been overcast & rainy for most of the day. Yesterday may have been my only good day. Looking at the weather forecast, it looks like scattered or afternoon thunderstorms right up until I leave. Oh well, guess that means I'll just have to come back!! =D