I wanted to sleep in today, since we've had to be up early the last two days, but that plan (sort of) failed. We got up around 815 to get tickets and then head over to the Cairns train station to catch the Kuranda Scenic Railway, a 2-hour historic train ride up to the rainforest town of Kuranda.
The train ride is definitely scenic, as you wind your way up the mountains, around deep gorges, through 15 tunnels, and even past a waterfall (of the Barron River). For some reason, all of the 20 other people in our train car were over 70, but when we saw the crowd getting off the other cars, we were reassured that Kuranda wasn't just one big retirement home!
My cold is lingering, so combined with the lack of sleep and of breakfast, I was exceptionally low energy. The first stop was lunch, at the Rainforest View Restaurant. Cheap prices can be explained by the small portion sizes. The food was tasty (and the waitresses cute), but that didn't really help the empty stomach.
Our first post-lunch stop was the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary, a butterfly breeding and exhibition site in Kuranda. The main attraction is a large greenhouse of rainforest plants and a HUGE number of butterflies flying around. Seriously not for the insect-phobic. There were several very colorful species floating around, including the electric blue Ulysses butterfly, and the green Cairns birdwing, but it's remarkably hard to get good pictures of most, because they fold up their wings when they land.
The two drab-looking butterflies below are actually brilliant blue Ulysses butterflies, but they've folded their wings so that the colorful top halves are hardly showing.
In addition to the main greenhouse, there's also a small museum showing transfixed specimens., and the breeding laboratory, where you can see living examples of every life cycle stage of most of the butterflies. It turns out that the Hercules moth has a suitably gigantic caterpillar:
After the butterfly sanctuary, we visited the Kuranda Koala Gardens, a small zoo showing off crocodiles, snakes, turtles, and the star attractions: kangaroos and wallabies you can feed, and koalas with which you can take pictures. Though we'd just seen most of these animals at the Taronga Zoo, this was interesting because the small size of the park meant you could get much closer to the animals. None of us opted to pay to get a picture cuddling a koala, though.
On the way back, we took the Skyrail, a 45 minute cable car that flies over the rain forest canopy to Caravonica (a town just outside the Cairns airport). The view from the Skyrail is amazing, both over the canopy and as you descend from the mountains back to the coastal areas. Additionally, there are two stops (at the Barron River and Red Peak), with short interpretive boardwalk nature trails that are interesting and can easily be covered in 20 minutes apiece. At the first stop, there's an option to take a hike through the rainforest with an Aboriginal guide, but we didn't have enough time this time around. Have to save some stuff for the next trip!
Dinner was the $12 "famous Aussie BBQ" at our hostel, the Tropic Days. The BBQ is justifiably famous, serving up 5 kinds of salad, beef sausages, barramundi, crocodile, emu, and kangaroo.
I was expecting emu to be chicken-like, but it's actually a remarkably beef-like red meat. Kangaroo is similar, but with a slightly different texture. Both were extremely lean -- no marbling. Crocodile was actually quite chicken-like, but a bit tougher and with chunks of border fat like you would find on red meat.
