Part 4 - Cairns
March 15 - 17, 2005
Tuesday, March 15th: Kuranda
We were somewhat poorly prepared for this day, so it started out kind of frazzled but worked out well in the end. The day wasted in the airport and the late night by the time we got to the hotel kind of put us out of our rhythm, and we were a bit late getting out of the hotel. We wanted to ride the Kuranda Skyrail and Kuranda Scenic Railway, but we weren't sure how it all worked, so we picked up some brochures as we left the hotel and drove just north out of Cairns to the station where you get on the Skyrail. We bought our tickets for both rides, then went back into town to get some breakfast at a nice little cafe that we came across. (They didn't really have anything that I wanted for breakfast, so I had a slice of this crazy chocolate-chocolate cake with a truffle on top. What the heck, I was on vacation.) Then we headed back to the station to ride the Skyrail. The Skyrail is basically a gondola ride over the rainforest to a mountaintop city called Kuranda. There are two stations along the way where you can get off and see some sights.
At the first stop, Red Peak station, we walked a short boardwalk through the rainforest and learned a bit about some of the plants that were common in the area. One of the more interesting things we saw (which became a running joke as we were very proud to have learned it) was the basket fern. The basket fern is a type of plant called an epiphyte that grows without soil. These large ferns attach themselves to trees and basically grow their own planter out of leaves. They aren't parasites - they only use the "host" tree for support. They're pretty cool, and we saw them all over the place in the tropical areas.
At the next stop, Barron Falls Station, we saw some nice views of Barron Falls, which was apparently really roaring because of the cyclone up north and the general fact that we were there during the wet season. I didn't realize how swollen the falls were until I came across this photo that somebody else took at a different time of the year. There was also some information about how school children used to ride some sort of cable car across the falls back in the day in order to get to school (beats riding a bus), and there was an interpretive center that gave us some more rainforest facts.
The final stop was Kuranda Station, on top of a mountain in the town of Kuranda. It was definitely a touristy town, with lots of attractions and gift shops, but it managed to stay on the right side of tacky, I think. It was really quite a cool little village, and I wish we'd gotten an earlier start so we'd have had more time to explore there. As it was, we wandered around looking at some of the gorgeous flowers and plants that were just growing randomly beside the sidewalk. We went to the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary, a walk-through butterfly house where we saw some really pretty butterflies up close. Then we went to Birdworld, a walk-through aviary where we saw some really amazing birds. They had a cassowary (a large rainforest bird that kind of looks like an emu), a lot of colorful tropical birds, and a lot of cool looking water birds. They also had an area where the birds were kind of tame and you could feed them. The birds would land on your head and eat out of your hand - it was really cool.
We had a train to catch, so we ate a quick lunch and went back to Kuranda Station to catch the Scenic Railway back down the mountain. The railway winds its way down the side of the mountain, through a bunch of tunnels, stopping briefly at an overlook on the opposite side of Barron Falls. Unfortunately, my camera battery died right before we got to the most beautiful part of the trip, where a big waterfall plunges right beside the train and under the trestle, but I bought a postcard of it, which is almost as good. But still, what a time for the battery to expire...
At the bottom of the mountain, there was a quick bus ride back to the station where our car was parked, then we headed back to the hotel to make dinner plans. We went out walking a bit by the shore, looking at crabs and water birds out in the mud exposed by the low tide. We walked around a cool public pool that's right by the ocean, the Cairns Lagoon (http://www.cairnsconvention.com.au/Cairns_lagoon_night.htm). It's a chlorinated pool, but the edge facing the ocean is designed so that it looks like it flows into the ocean. We eventually got dinner at Barnacle Bill's, a pretty nice open air seafood restaurant right on the main road by the beach, and the food was outstanding. Then, after picking up some water and junk food at Woolworth's, we headed back to the hotel for the night.
This was possibly my favorite day of the whole trip, though we did have quite a few really great days. For whatever reason, though, I really enjoyed things from start to finish. The Skyrail and Scenic Railway worked out just right, Kuranda was really nice, Cairns is a beautiful city, it was just a great day. Cairns is a pretty small city, but there's a lot there - the downtown area is bustling with restaurants and shops by the ocean, but just a few minutes drive out of the city and you're alone on a deserted beach, with rainforest-covered mountains sloping all the way down to the shore.
Wednesday, March 16th: Great Barrier Reef
We booked the only "tour package" of the trip for the Great Barrier Reef for this day. I was really looking forward to finding out what's so great about the barrier reef, as the Old 97's would say, and we had a good bit of concern about how reef trip would work out given the weather and stuff. Things worked out OK, though - the day was beautiful, and they told us the water was the clearest it had been in a couple of weeks. It wasn't crystal clear, but it was still pretty good. (Better than the ocean water I'm used to seeing, certainly.)
We left Cairns around 8 AM and drove about an hour north to Port Douglas. It was about this time that I was REALLY getting sick of roundabouts, as there were probably 7 of them in the first 15 miles north of Cairns, and this was the fifth time we'd driven that stretch of road since we arrived. I'm sure the roundabouts have some benefits, but they're also kind of a pain in the butt. The smallest ones are tricky, because when there's any traffic volume, it becomes hard to enter because the gaps are so small. The biggest ones, consisting of multiple lanes and various bypasses and other craziness, are just hard to figure out - I'm pretty sure I exited a couple of the big roundabouts by cutting through another lane (but I'm not really sure, because some of them were really confusing), but I didn't wreck, so I guess it's all good.
We got to the Marina, which was part of a shopping mall, paid for our tickets, and waited to board the boat. The boat was operated by Quicksilver tours (website), and it was a large, comfortable 2-level thing. The trip out to the reef started about 9:30 and took about an hour and a half, during which time we ate cookies, watched reef videos, reviewed some information about activities at the reef, and talked to a nice older couple from the UK that was sitting across from us. (I was rather proud of myself that I was able to distinguish a UK accent from an Australian one.) During the trip, I got sucked into the coolness of the introductory scuba diving activity, so I signed up for it and went to a short training class.
The boat docked at a permanent platform out on the reef, a two story platform with a fair amount of room for sitting and eating (they served a good lunch while we were out there), walking around looking at the reef, and so forth. There were a couple of platforms where you could get into the water for snorkeling, and some other platforms where the scuba tours started from. They also had a small underwater observatory, cruises on semi-submersible boats out through the reef, and helicopter tours (for an additional charge).
The first thing we did was to gather our snorkeling equipment and change into our lycra body suits - they weren't required, but they only cost $5, and protected you from the sun and from jellyfish, so they were probably worth it, and since nearly everybody was wearing them, you didn't feel too ridiculous. After a LONG time (Julie is maybe the slowest person on the planet, especially when you're trying to do things efficiently in limited time), we got into the water. I'd never snorkeled before, so it took me a few minutes to start trusting that I wasn't going to get a mouth full of water, and to learn to breathe normally. After that, it was a lot of fun. The coral was mostly pretty shallow - in some places, if you swam over it, you had to stay outstretched to avoid kicking and damaging the coral. So we got some pretty good views of a lot of cool coral and some pretty fish. Julie took some decent pictures of the coral and fish with a disposable underwater camera (which was incredibly poorly developed by the Walgreens she took it to when we got back).
Eventually, we got a bit tired and headed back to the platform, where we checked out the views from the underwater observatory. (This photo is Photoshopped to bring out the colors of things a bit. Nothing was actually really brightly colored besides some of the fish, but there was a lot of color in the coral.) We ate lunch (a good buffet of various salads and meats), and I bought and mailed a post card to my parents (there was a mailbox on the platform with a special cancellation stamp). By then, it was too late to do any more snorkeling before my scuba excursion, so we just kind of hung out.
The scuba group consisted of four guys, and one woman who was the teacher. They fitted us with our equipment (which was a lot heavier than I expected) and had us walk into the water. We practiced breathing through the regulator with our faces in the water, then sat down completely underwater for some more tests. The teacher had us pull our regulator out and swap it with the backup and clear it, in case we lost it while we were underwater. We also demonstrated that we could clear our masks and a few other basic skills. One guy freaked out a bit at this point, but the teacher talked to him and settled him down, and he went on with the dive.
Next, we shimmied down some ropes to a lower platform, clearing our ears (by pinching our noses and blowing) every 10 feet or so. That was the part I was most worried about - I've always had a lot of trouble with my ears, and I've never been very good at holding my nose and popping them, but it turned out to not be a problem for me at all. When we got to the lower platform, we then pulled ourselves along some ropes sloping down toward the sandy ocean floor, probably about 30 or 40 feet below the surface. Then we all joined hands and swam to some nearby "demo coral" and settled down on the bottom to have a look. I took some decent pictures with my underwater camera, but Walgreens was completely unable to develop it, so I'm afraid those photos were lost. If I ever do anything like this again, I'll probably buy the underwater case for my digital camera.
The first thing we saw at the bottom was some sort of coral that kind of looked like an anemone, with some little clownfish swimming among its fronds. We were able to reach out and touch the soft parts of the coral, which kind of clung to your fingers when you touched them. It was a really odd sensation. We then swam to another site, but things went slowly, because one of the guys in the group kept sinking. I guess they were having a hard time getting his buoyancy set right, or maybe he wasn't kicking enough, I don't know. He was beside me in our hand-holding line, and kept dragging me down with him. We eventually got where we were going, to a giant clam about 2 feet wide. The teacher teased the clam to make it snap, and we were allowed to touch the lining inside the shell.
By this point in the dive, we were down to our "return point" on the air tanks, so we swam back to the platform, pulled ourselves up the ropes, and got back out where we started from. All in all, the class took about an hour, and we maybe had 15 good minutes underwater looking at coral up close. The scuba diving experience was pretty cool, but I really should have just snorkeled more rather than take the class, as it worked out. To solidify that opinion, they videotaped all the classes and showed the tapes on the boat on the trip back, and some of the other classes that only had 2 people in them and had fewer problems got to see a lot more stuff underwater. Between having to test 4 of us, and the guy that freaked out, and the guy that kept sinking, we lost a lot of time. But on the plus side, now I can say that I've scuba dived.
The boat was leaving the reef at 3:30, so by the time I was done with the dive, it was about time to change into dry clothes and get back on the boat, so that's what we did. We sat with the couple from the UK again, and told each other about what we did - I don't think either of them even got in the water, which kind of seems like a waste. It's a long way to go to look at stuff through cloudy glass. We got back to the marina about 5, and started the drive back down to Cairns, stopping at a few scenic overlooks and deserted beaches along the way. None of my photos really do the beauty of the place justice - the beaches were pretty, the mountains were pretty, and the clouds coming in low over the mountains were just amazing. We watched the sunset from a dock near Palm Cove, then headed back to the hotel for the evening.
Thursday, March 17th: Cape Tribulation
We started our last full day in Cairns by once again driving north from town through the dozen roundabouts that we'd already driven through about 6 times. (Julie tried for quite a while to take a decent picture of the twisty road, the mountains, and the beach along the highway as I drove.) I'm really interested to go back to Cairns and have a look at what's west and south of town, because we covered the north side really, really well. On this day, we were heading as far north as our rental car contract would allow, to Cape Tribulation (located at the base of, no kidding, Mt. Sorrow, and named by Captain Cook after he hit a nearby reef). We were somewhat concerned with just how wild the area would be, based on what we'd read in our guidebooks, but while the area is very sparsely populated, it turned out to be quite an easy trip. Parts of the road that used to be gravel had been paved recently, and we didn't have any problems with flooding, though there was potential for that - we crossed over numerous dry floodways across the road, and drove through a few shallow creeks that flow across the road all the time.
Our first stop along the way was in the town of Mossman, a sugarcane growing town. We saw a lot of old narrow-gauge railroad lines that used to be (and may still be) used to transport the cane to the town from the fields lining the highway. A couple of miles out of town, we visited Mossman Gorge, where the Mossman River flows swiftly through a lot of rocks, making for some pretty rapids. Some of the trails in the gorge area were closed for renovations, but we walked all that we could and got a look at a few parts of the river.
Next, we headed north to Daintree, the last, very small town before you cross the Daintree River into the Cape Tribulation National Forest. Julie's parents visited the same area a few years ago, and as chance would have it, we ate at the same restaurant that they did. (I guess it's not much of a coincidence, since there were only two restaurants, and the other one didn't have a giant fish on the front of it.) After a bit of a comedy wherein I apparently had a momentary stroke that affected only the part of my brain controlling parking (I screwed up so badly that I was embarrassed enough to give up and drive around a bit before coming back to try again, and I'm not really sure what happened), we went in for lunch. The restaurant was kind of cool - all the seating was outside under a canopy, and there was a pet cat patrolling the area that seemed to enjoy our company - it came over to visit with us and napped nearby while we ate. After lunch, we pondered booking a Daintree River cruise (crocodile watching, that sort of thing), but unfortunately, time didn't really permit it).
Instead, we headed on north to catch the Daintree River ferry, the only way across the river in the area. We lucked out and boarded the ferry just as it was about to cross the river - the crossing only takes a minute or two, but the ferry apparently only runs every half hour. Not far along the steep, twisty road into the forest, we stopped at a scenic lookout for a view of the spot where the Daintree flows into the ocean. Then we stopped at the Rainforest Discovery Centre, a very nicely-done educational center with a lot of elevated boardwalk trails through various levels of the rainforest, including a canopy tower that allowed you to climb through the levels of the rainforest to a view from above the canopy. The admission included an audio guide and a detailed booklet with a lot of information about various plants and animals in the rainforest. We didn't see much in the way of fauna, but we did see a giant spider next to the trail at one point.
We continued north, stopping briefly at Thornton Beach, another deserted beach that would be really awesome if you had the time to just go hang out on the beach all day. We saw a box jellyfish warning sign that's been a source of great amusement even to the present, and a ton of little burrows created by some kind of crab. The little crabs apparently dig the holes by balling up the sand between their claws, coming up to the surface, and pitching the balls of sand out of the hole. They were kind of shy, but it was pretty amusing to watch them work when they did put in an appearance.
Our next stop was the Marrdja Boardwalk, another boardwalk trail through the rainforest. This one was interesting because it wound its way through an area where a freshwater creek met the ocean, so there were forests of various kinds of mangrove trees all around (I'd never seen mangrove trees up close before), along with related wildlife like mangrove crabs that were present in abundance. Along the way we also saw a cool strangler fig that had grown up a tree that had since died and rotted away, leaving the mesh of woody vines standing free where it used to encompass the tree.
Our final stop was Cape Tribulation itself. The beach was nearly deserted except for a couple of people walking on the sand and a few people on a boat a couple hundred yards out. We saw mangrove trees growing right on the beach, brilliant sunshine through some dramatic clouds, and a cool looking palm tree. Then we turned around and headed home, catching the ferry at sunset just as it was about to cross the river again. We picked up dinner from a good little carry-out pizza place in Cairns, and went back to the hotel to get our bags packed for the cross-country flight the next morning.
