Monday 14th: Kuranda

Pete wakes me up at 6:30 am with a cup of tea: we have to get up early to be picked up by our tour at 8 am. Breakfast by the pool again, and this time there's also custard apple among the tropical fruits, which is delicious.

Today we catch the tour bus to the Freshwater train station north of Cairns, ride the train up the mountain to Kuranda, have lunch there, and then catch the SkyRail (cable car) down again.

Our bus driver is cheerful and amusing, and very good at promoting tourist spots around Port Douglas. There are several other couples on the bus, mostly Australian. We travel back down the coast, the same road we arrived by on Friday. At Freshwater we pay for our tickets and then get on the train, which has about a dozen carriages and two brightly painted engines. The guy sitting next to me and Pete is from Neutral Bay, Sydney and is a keen scuba diver and photographer: most of the trip he's standing outside the carriage on the balcony to get the best shots. At first the rail track is flat and runs through houses, and then it starts climbing through the rainforest. There are spectacular views back out over the ocean and south to Cairns, and Sue and I take lots of photos (until my camera battery runs out, which it shouldn't have done). The train trip takes an hour and a half, with one stop at Barron Falls. This is the train line where they had a land slide earlier this year because of heavy rain, and the line was closed for a week. We go through lots of tunnels and over lots of bridges. The line was built in the 1880s, I think, and pretty much done with pick and shovel and a bit of dynamite.

Anyway, we get to Kuranda at 11:30 am. Everything's well sign posted. It's ironic, in what I think of as a hippie town, that everything's catering to tourism, but I guess they have to make a living. I leave Pete with Jim, and Sue and I work our way up one side of the main street exploring the shops. In one dress shop I buy a blue sarong to wear with my new bathers. There are three markets in Kuranda and we visit two of them. There are some local crafts but a lot of it is imported clothes and jewellery. We find a street stall that sells local home made icecream (made by the vendor's wife) and I have ginger and pineapple. He says business has been down for the last year and a half, but he's just bought his wife a $60,000 icecream machine so she has more time for other things. In this market I find a blue dress and get a pendant thrown in for free. Lots of stalls are closed but maybe they open on weekends.

Near the Rainforest Markets there's an old airplane that looks as if it crashed there, but it was actually used in a movie and transported here later. We skip the Bird Display and go to the Butterfly Display. It's a large glasshouse structure with tropical plants and boardwalks and there are butterflies everywhere. The Ulysses butterflies are big butterflies with brilliant blue on the top side of their wings, and we've seen them near the swimming pool at our hotel, so they're local and not rare, but they're really hard to photograph because when they alight their wings meet and the blue is hidden.

We're also able to visit the laboratory, and here we can see the caterpillars feeding and pupae hatching. Some of the caterpillars are huge, the size of my forefinger, and beautifully coloured and marked.

We stop at a cafe across the street for lunch. I have a huge piece of apple pie and a glass of wine, which I could well have done without. We decide to take a bushwalk rather than walk back down the main street, but we're running out of time. The 3 km walk usually takes an hour, and we are supposed to meet Pete at the SkyRail station at 2 pm (and I have his ticket, so he can't go without us). Just as we set off I see a house where they do bat rescue, and would like to visit, but discover it's not open on Mondays. Sue and I set a good pace on the bushwalk and managed to do it in 25 minutes.

We meet Pete at SkyRail just after 2 pm. The others are at the head of a long queue, and we are a long way behind, so we wait for quite a while before we get a car. They leave some cars empty, and we wonder why; it turns out this is so people at the other stations will be able to get a seat. The views are stunning: we're far above the canopy of the rainforest, and can see the mountains around us. We arrive at the Barron Falls station just as the others are departing. There's a tame cassowary near the footpath. We take a quick look at the interpretative centre and the lookout, which gives us a view of Barron Falls from the opposite side to the train. At the Red Peak station we have to change cars and queue again because the cars are on a different loop. Sue does the boardwalk, but we don't have time for the guided tour so it's back on the SkyRail. It takes us up over the peak and we see the ocean and Cairns below us.

As we come into the base SkyRail station there's a lake below us where water skiers are practising going over jumps: but instead of being towed by boats they're being pulled around by cables.

We have to wait a while to be picked up by our bus. On the way home our driver points out two crocodiles sunning themselves by the river, and even turns around and goes past again so we can all get a look.

Back home, the others head for the Central Hotel to watch the football and Sue and I wrestle with a cryptic crossword while we have a cuppa. When we join them for dinner the lamb shanks are still sold out but I'm happy to just have soup. We leave them to it and come back to watch MasterChef and update the blog. I haven't watched MasterChef before but I can see the fascination: the audience barracks for the contestants and the judges play the bad guys.

Tomorrow we're going snorkelling, so I'm planning an early night tonight.