Down Under

We spent two more very full days in the Cairns area. There is so much variety in landscape here. On Thursday, we took a tourist train up into the mountains to Kuranda. This train line was built to carry equipment and supplies to the gold fields in the 1880's. It became a lifeline for the tableland area when mining died down and agriculture became important up there. Now it is a tourist train, going up into the rainforest. They get four metres of rain there in a year and the wet season is about to begin. Not that day, though. Hot humid weather and we felt it when we went for a walk through rain forest areas and ended up with an uphill trek at the end into Kuranda. That beer for lunch tasted awfully good. Coming back, we took the sky train, which is actually a gondola, over the top of the rainforest canopy. It was quite impressive for those of us who were able to take it all on. I, personally, tried to look back up the slope mostly, and managed to keep calm. (When we were finishing the siding on the house last fall, I found it necessary to go up in the bucket of the lift one day to help Dave. It was my "suck it up buttercup" time, and much the same feeling as this ride.)
Friday we had another early start to go on a tour to the outback. Before leaving, there was a shower and a lovely rainbow from our balcony.
We travelled by 4WD mini-bus type vehicle up past where we had been the day before and across the tablelands. Starting off in rainforest, we soon moved into a much dryer climate. It was irrigated agricultural land with fields of sugar cane several hundred acres in size. There were many huge groves of mangoes, some avocados and lychee. These crops are able to grow continuously so that there are canes fields in harvest, some just starting to grow and everything in between. The mangoes trees too, were at almost every stage, except blossoming.
Once we crossed the area that was irrigated, we got to more "outback" conditions, scrubby trees and bushes and thousands of termite mounds, from small ones, a foot high, to huge round ones higher than our heads. Because there had been some rain, the first since May, things were pretty green. Though this area there are big cattle stations. Gavin, our guide, said at one point, that that particular station covered 20 km to our left and another 20 km to our right. The cattle there were painfully thin, ribs showing horribly and seemed mostly to be crosses with Brahma of some kind. Gavin said they would have had little food through the winter because of the lack of rain.
We saw emus at one stop, the father caring for two chicks while mother wandered around. The male is in charge of the eggs and then the young. We also had our first views of kangaroos and wallabies. They can really move.
Our end destination was an old mining town, now almost empty. The sun blazed down as we looked at the old smelters. We moved on to the caves, where it was blissfully cooler. They are in a National Park and we had a ranger as our guide as we went about one kilometre along through big caverns and small passageways. This limestone was once the bottom of a sea and was buckled up 400 million years ago. There were fossils on the walls from the ancient sea. The day required a long drive each way, but really gave us an idea of the vast variety in conditions within a few hours of Cairns. Twelve hours after leaving in the morning, we were back at our little oasis.Read more