On
Sunday morning we enjoyed the service (especially the rousing choruses of “Give
Me Oil in my Lamp” as the closing song) at Trinity Lutheran Church before
heading out of Cairns for a day trip off the coast and into the rain
forest. The Skyrail Rainforest Cableway
is a few miles out of town, and is a cable gondola system that stretches over
the tree tops of the Barron Gorge National Park for about 5 miles up a
mountain. We took a “diamond view” car,
which meant that our gondola had a glass-bottom floor so we could look below us
as well as to the sides.
At
two stations mid-way up we were able to get off and walk through the trees on
boardwalks, and learn more about their fight for sunlight and how many of the
trees are actually planted from above and grow down! We took a ton of pictures
of the waterfall (fairly thin in the dry season), and eventually disembarked in
the village of Kuranda. Jake decided he
didn’t need another leather cowboy hat (although the kangaroo leather one is
much nicer than the cowhide one he has), but Hans discovered how much he wants
one. Fortunately, we were getting hungry
so needed to cut our shopping short. After lunch we wandered through the town
and took a look at some of those fantastic antipodean animals-that-can-kill-you
at the Australian Venom Zoo (and held a couple of the ones that won’t).
Our
trip back down the mountain was on the Scenic Railway, originally built in the
1880s, heavily used in WWII and now a tourist train. Once back in town, we found a gelato shop and
the kids got some more use of Cairns’ beautiful infinity pool while we waited
for evening and our next adventure.
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