Since Blayne and I have both been fighting colds, we decided to start our tour of Cairns slowly. We dropped into an information centre in Cairns and on the advice of the travel agent, booked a tour to Kuranda on December 18th and a tour of the Great Barrier Reef for the 19th. We thought that a jungle trek would improve our congested heads.
The mountaintop village and historic rainforest park of Kuranda is accessible by car, train and sky-rail. We took the historic train from Cairns to Kuranda, a journey of just over an hour and a climb from sea level to 334 metres. The rail-line was built in the mid-to late-1800s and the number of injuries and deaths related by the narration on the train was staggering. Many died of bubonic plague, malaria, and accidents like tunnel cave-ins. Although the narration didn’t make clear why the railway was constructed, it appears it was built for gold mining and tropical timber logging. The railway itself was a staggering feat of engineering, as the narration kept repeating, with cliffs that were chiseled away on one side and tunnels dug by hand through mountains and gorges on the other.
Once in Kuranda, and having secured more medication for Blayne, we wandered around looking at the many little craft shops. Then we set off on a trek through the rainforest, which is a protected world-heritage site. We saw a number of lizards and several turkey-sized birds stalking through the jungle. Some insects were making the most incredible buzzing noise like a cicada, only much more intense. Blayne finally spotted a brownish-gray moth that was making the noise, an observation that was verified when I took pictures of it and the noise increased considerably. The noise that thousands of these moths made was deafeningly painful.
The mountaintop village and historic rainforest park of Kuranda is accessible by car, train and sky-rail. We took the historic train from Cairns to Kuranda, a journey of just over an hour and a climb from sea level to 334 metres. The rail-line was built in the mid-to late-1800s and the number of injuries and deaths related by the narration on the train was staggering. Many died of bubonic plague, malaria, and accidents like tunnel cave-ins. Although the narration didn’t make clear why the railway was constructed, it appears it was built for gold mining and tropical timber logging. The railway itself was a staggering feat of engineering, as the narration kept repeating, with cliffs that were chiseled away on one side and tunnels dug by hand through mountains and gorges on the other.
Once in Kuranda, and having secured more medication for Blayne, we wandered around looking at the many little craft shops. Then we set off on a trek through the rainforest, which is a protected world-heritage site. We saw a number of lizards and several turkey-sized birds stalking through the jungle. Some insects were making the most incredible buzzing noise like a cicada, only much more intense. Blayne finally spotted a brownish-gray moth that was making the noise, an observation that was verified when I took pictures of it and the noise increased considerably. The noise that thousands of these moths made was deafeningly painful.
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