Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Skyrail over the Rainforest

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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