Having spent all day yesterday sunbaking at the lagoon - it was time to get out and about.

We booked onto a tour to head up to the rainforests at Kurundi National Park.

The Cairns - Kuranda Scenic Railway was built between 1882 and 1891, and has been preserved as a tourist train to get out to the rainforest of Kuranda. The train station itself has also been preserved with a little tea shop, a museum and lovely gardens to wander through while waiting for your train.

The railway took years to build, and the whole way on the train, an informative little film plays telling you snippets of history and points of interest along the way.

We climbed continously for around an hour and the views all the way up the mountains further into the rainforest were absolutly stunning.
View image
View image
View image
View image

Kurunda is a national park and the touristy bit is called Rainforestation. It opened in 1996 and is over 40 hectares with over 30 hectares of tropical rainforest and once there it was all a bit tourist bus organised. Janny and I are not really the organised tour types, so we jumped ship and rearranged our own day and wandered about happily away from the crowds.

The little zoo up at the top of the park had all the usualls, crocs.
Feeding time can get a little dramatic (not my picture, but very impressive methinks - gives you an idea of the size of him eh?) The crocs up at Rainforestation were freshwater crocs and are only found in Australia. They grow up to 3.5m and are pretty nippy - hitting up to 18km an hour on land - and they have really big teeth!

They also had koalas, dingos etc etc - but something I've never seen before was Kangaroos with Joeys that were so chilled out they let us right up to stroke them. So far, all the mother's Ive seen get freaked out if someone goes too close to them, so I've always stayed well clear of them, but these cuties were happy to be petted.

One of the things Ive always wanted to do since I first saw them was hold a Koala. You're not allowed to in New South Wales, but in Queensland you can in certian places. Luckily Kuranda is one of those places. The second we realised we were able to do it - we dashed over to get our pics taken holding a proper little babe of a koala. Im so chuffed! (we were'nt allowed to take our own cameras in there, but I bought the picture they took. Once I get to a scanner I'll post it up)

After our photo call, we got onto the army duck - its an amphibious (sp?) boat/truck thing that started off driving around the rainforest with our guide telling us all about the various plants, wildlife and edibles all around us. I can't remember what this is called, but basically a sort of ivy thing lodges onto the tree and creates a little hanging basket - all the leaves that die through the winter fall into it, and the mulchy stuff they turn into support the tree and heaps of little animals through the winter in the rainforest. Apparently the temperature really drops in the winter at night, and a lot of the bugs etc would die off, and this is natures way of surving the winter. Go nature!
After a short while we headed out into the river and the duck turned into a boat - splashing into the water was ace! View image

After the duck ride, it was just time for a spot of lunch in the village, a wander round the shops and then we were just in time to catch the skytrain (cable car) with more spectacular views of the rainforest: View image
View imageView imageView imageView image View image View imagebefore returning to the pick up point to catch the coach to Cairns.

A fantastic day!