After spending our first night in the Balinese motel, we were up by 8am and ready to go to Kurunda - a well-known rainforest and tourist town. This daytime adventure was inspired by the fact that after so much diving, we were not allowed to fly for at least 24 hours. Once again, a company picked us up, along with a half dozen other people and took us to the base of the rainforest.
Even though we had preordered our tickets, but still were lucky enough to wait in a Disneyland-worthy line, though it did move fairly quickly. The first stage of Kurunda was a gondola over rainforest with multiple stops to get off, walk through the rainforest floor, and take pictures.
Here was our first gondola:
We sat with a family from Adelaide (South Australia) who was in town for their children's wedding. They were the first people to tell us they liked the American accent. We were a little surprised. However, most of the first segment we spent looking at the incredible views:
This was looking out onto the ocean/bay and the city of Cairns in the distance. After the first hill, the more unique view was in every direction - the hills were COVERED in trees of all shapes, sizes, and breeds. There was no empty space and no sign of human existence (minus the gondola). Here is a view straight down.
At the first exit point, we got off to walk through a small section of the rainforest. Here is us at one of the lookouts:
We then hopped back onto the gondolas, this time getting one all to ourselves, and rode for 15 minutes to the next location, this time the main feature being the views of Baron Falls:
We spent probably a good half hour just looking at the falls from every angle possible, most intrigued by the color of the water, which is brown (it's not your computer screen, we promise). The third leg of the gondola ride took us over a river, which was also brown.
We finally reached the top of the gondola ride, putting us in the town of Kurunda. While there was some aboriginal art and jewelry for sale, it was mainly a tourist town, with lots of small shops, witty t-shirts, and coffee and sandwich shops. We walked the main street end to end, walking away with only one impulse buy - a bottle of local mango wine. We bought it after doing a free tasting of the three varieties - dry, medium, and sweet, as well as the mango liquer, which was quite delicious. Here is a picture of what is left. :)
We did also try a small sample of the local cuisine, including freshly made banana saltwater taffy and Stephen tried a curry meat pie. I had hot chips, what are french fries in Australia (crisps are chips, biscuits are cookies, and its all very confusing).
As we had some time to kill before our return back down the mountain, we walked along the brown river and practiced our bird calls.
Around quarter to 2 we headed over to the train station, as we got to take the hour and a half scenic railway back down the mountain, which included 15 tunnels and 25km of turns. Here is the train and some of the views (Baron Falls again and the city of Cairns):
Once we got off the train, we headed back to the Balinese and decided we should probably do some laundry after living on a boat for 3 days and traveling for almost 2 weeks. Stephen checked emails, I updated our dive logs, and we played Gin while guarding our laundry.
After our clothes had been laundered, folded, and packed into our travel bags, we walked the 6 blocks into town and wandered through a large section of Cairns - settling on Thai for dinner. Since the night was still slightly young and we weren't ready to go to bed, we walked through some night markets and found an incredible deal - $15 for a 40 minute Chinese massage.
We couldn't pass up the opportunity:
You can see the whole list of things we had done in the background. Unfortunately, this picture does not capture Stephen with his feet in a large bucket of black tea. It was absolutely worth the money - best massage I've ever had - we walked back to the hotel that night so relaxed, we couldn't believe we hadn't done this sooner.
We then crawled into bed and tried to get as much sleep as possible knowing we had a 6am flight the next morning with a 4:15am taxi pickup - sending us to the Whitsunday Islands.
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