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Published: December 31st 2009
Second day - the sky hasn’t been cleared up yet, but certainly a lot brighter than yesterday. We got up at 6:30am for our Rainforestation Nature Park and Kuranda day tour, a cultural and tropical rainforest experience.
At first, we were not sure if we wanted to do this tour as we are both not a big fan of trees and birds; also, we have already seen a few forests in Sydney and Tasmania. However, considering that we’ve missed all the culture sites on our way, we decided to give this a try. If we are making it this far, we might as well take a look at the tropical rainforest.
This tour is run by Tropic Wings. They run a combination of different tours to Kuranda and
Rainforestation, all being picked up by the same bus. We arrived Rainforestation by coach after over an hour of driving. We were the first group there (by the way, we= 4 people, the rest of the group went on a train tour, which 4 of us opted out). As we were waiting for the Pamagirri Aboriginal (one of the Northern Queensland tribe) experience, I wandered around the Tropical Fruit Orchard and
saw some of my most favorite tropical fruits on trees while many others I have never heard of. It was a bonus to find out that two of my favourite fruits are grown in Queensland - mangoes and lychee - I am going to buy some local fruits from the weekend fruit market on Sunday. I tried fresh jackfruits here for the first time in my life. We learned a little bit about the culture background of the aboriginal people, but most fun of all - boomerang-throwing and didgeridoo playing! Carlos got pretty good at throwing the boomerang. It actually came back in circle and almost hit me on my head! We spent a total of 3 hours there, seeing the mini wildlife park, touring the rainforest by a World War II Army Duck, cruising the river and learning more about the different species of tropical plants. Very informative, but I think it’s not bad! We even saw a koala with a joey! Before we left, we also took a picture with a koala. I have been wanting to do this for a long time, Carlos finally agreed to hold the koala!! The koala we held had very sharp nails,
Carlos even got scratches on his shoulder, well, at least it did not pee on him.
Our next stop was the Kuranda village, where the sky rail station to the tropical rain forest is. We opted out the Australia BBQ buffet lunch, so we had a bit of free time wandering around before our scheduled boarding time to the sky rail. After lunch, we shopped around the markets, not very much to see…
Finally it’s time to board the sky rail. The skyrail is 7.5km long (about 30 to 40 minutes train ride), with two stops along to way to see the Barron Falls and a walk in the forest. It was a nice ride seeing the aged tropical rainforest with big trees and different species of wildlife. I enjoyed learning about the plants and how they were used by aboriginal people, which allowed me to have another slight glimpse of the wisdom of God’s creation.
We got back the Cairns at around 5 and the sky was all cleared up! Yeah! The weather should be good for scuba diving tomorrow.
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