North Queensland Day 2

Up into the rainforest on our first full day. For those that haven't been, Cairns and the rest of the coast is a thin strip about 5km deep backing onto the great dividing range.

Today we took a cable car up into the rainforest, past the Barron Gorge and falls, and up to Kalundra, an old staging post town, turned hip craft market, tourist spot.

This trip had trapped tourist all over it, but from the minute we started it was great. After an initial climb the cable car settled into a routine of gently gliding over the rainforest canopy, and once over the inital hill the coast vanished and we were in the Lost World. You could look out the window and down the 100 feet or so into the packed/tangled quagmire of vines, bushes, and ferns, or look out over the canopy and watch Cockatoo's swooping.

There were 2 interim stops, on the cable car with great opportunities to wander around boardwalks in within the forest. The second of these stops allowed a view of the Barron Gorge, the edge of which the cable car was following. At this point were the falls, with huge jagged cliffs carrying the river water down to the lower level. As it was the dry season the falls were great but rather overpowered by the cliffs. Postcards of them in full flow in the wet season look spectacular.

We eventually arrive at Kuranda which was a pleasant craft town. It also had a Butterfly World, where you got to wander around a greenhouse type area seeing some of the largest and most colourful butterflies I've ever seen including Cairns Bird Wing and Ulysees. Butterflies have the craziest abilities with that thing where they liquify there bodies in the cocoon and somehow rebuild it all into a butterfly. Its so specialized that toxins ingested by Cairn Birdwing caterpillars remain intact in the adult butterfly, completely ignored by the chemical soup process.

2 hours later we took the famous Kuranda train down the other side of the Gorge back to Cairns. This had been a working railway to get goods off the plateau to the coast, and included 15 tunnels chisseled out of the rock by hand - only in Australia.