Into the Rainforest
Trip Start
Dec 31, 2008
1
27
40
Trip End
Mar 27, 2009
Cairns,
Queensland,
Australia
Monday, February 23, 2009
Along the way, the skyrail made a few stops where we could get off and have a look around. The first stop just gave you a chance to take a little walk around the rainforest. The second stop was really cool- it gave you this great view of a huge waterfall that flows through the rainforest, where of course we snapped about 500 pictures. Perhaps the highlight, though, was when we stopped in at the visitors center and Courtney let out a blood-curdling scream, which scared the hell out of me. What had caused this reaction? She had spied a huge spider on an even huger web right outside the visitors center. It was about as big as my hand. Throughout the rest of the trip, Courtney would periodically have nightmares of that spider, which was pretty entertaining. This is not surprising, though, as I have probably killed about 200 spiders for Courtney in my day, since she has some sort of pathological fear of them.
We arrived in Kuranda, a small touristy village in the middle of a rainforest after our skyrail trip. Why anyone would live in the center of a rainforest on top of a mountain is a little beyond my comprehension, but I think it is some sort of aboriginal settlement originally. Anyways, within this town was a place called the Koala Farm where we purportedly could hold a koala, which you can only do in the state of Queensland (which is the state we were in). It cost us $15 to get in this place, and I think the three of us would all agree that this was money well spent. The place was not big, but had a bunch of crocodiles (of which Courtney was convinced were made of plastic for a solid 15 minutes) and other native animals such as reptiles and birds, but most notably koalas and wallabies (which small kangaroos). What was cool about this was that you could walk amongst the kangaroos and feed them, pet them, whatever you wanted. We found one that had a baby joey in its pouch and fed it and played with it for a while, which was really cool. The koalas were sitting within reaching distance and I found it fascinating that koalas sleep for 21 hours a day, but we happened to catch a few of them munching on some eucaplyptus. Courtney paid an additional $15 to actually hold the koala and have a professional photograph taken, but they let Andy and I get in a few pictures of us with our own camera and the koala (named Princess), which was fun.
After grabbing some lunch, we returned home on the Kuranda Scenic Railway, which was originally built in World War II, but now just takes tourists to and fro between Kuranda and Cairns. The railway ride was nice enough, but we were pretty gassed from the day and I nodded off a couple of times, though we got some spectacular views of the rainforest and surrounding region from the ride. That night, we ate and returned to Gilligan's, which was significantly subdued compared to the previous evening. We decided to call it quits fairly early since there wasn't a whole lot going on on a Sunday night, which coincided with the national day of mourning for the Victoria bush fire victims, which is a bit of a downer for everyone.
