From Kuranda by skyrail

After our jungle trek, we took the skyrail down the mountain. It was an absolutely exhilarating ride. The skyrail passes over the rainforest (all part of a U.N. world heritage site). It takes over an hour to travel down the mountain by skyrail—7.5 kms of cable with towers that were lifted into place by helicopters to avoid disturbing the rainforest. As a result, the forest is pristine. We got off the skyrail at two sites to look at the view down the mountain from platforms and to take short treks through the rainforest. At the Red Peak station we joined a guided tour given by an Aboriginal man. The most interesting part was about the cassowary, the bird that likes to chase people and can disembowel someone with its claws. But apparently cassowaries are not simply amoral killing machines. The guide said that the cassowary, a protected species with only several hundred to over a thousand left in the wild, has the unique ability to pass seeds from rainforest fruit through its system. Only the cassowary can digest the fruit and cause the seeds to germinate. If the cassowary goes extinct then over 400 plants will lose their ability to germinate their seeds and will also go extinct. The guide also said that the cassowary is the dreaming animal (seems to be like the totem spirit to Canadian aboriginal peoples) to his people. In their creation stories, they descended from the cassowary.

The pictures show the train to Kuranda slowly ascending the mountain along a very narrow track--there's only room for one train except at one point in the journey. The train stops once at a look-out over Barron Falls and I'm standing in front of the falls. It's a much bigger falls in times where rainfall is heavier. We traveled down the mountain in one of the skyrail compartments: it's a very smooth ride except when the skyrail car passes from one tower to another. I took the sweeping shots of Cairns and the rainforest from the skyrail car. The skyrail was an unforgettable experience. You fly over the rainforest and peer down on it—observing birds, nests, waterfalls, and animals. It’s absolutely undisturbed by people.