Cairns – 35 km

The last day of motorhome rental is always the same. You don’t want to stay too close to the final destination but you also don’t want to stay too far away to avoid the anxiety of getting back in time, rush hour traffic and everyone else doing the same thing. What to do, what to do. And then if you are close as we were this morning you want to find something to do for part of the day so you don’t waste the days rental, but you have also had enough of driving for a while! The last two weeks 4034 km to be exact. The grand total for the 4 weeks was 7652 km.

We had already done pretty much all we wanted to do in touristy Kuranda during our long walk yesterday but did want to go back there to use the internet from the information center. It wasn’t open and didn’t open until 10 am but Norma had copied down the access info so we were able to sit outside and do an entry to the blog. Before we left the campground we finally remembered to take a picture of a brush turkey. These are the ubiquitous rainforest birds who are mound builders: they scrape together a big pile of vegetation, lay their eggs and depend upon the composting action for incubation warmth. This bit of ingenuity saves sitting on them!

Norma's ant - note the huge butt end!

We had heard how spectacular the Barron Falls were so decided to take a drive out and see. It was a lovely rainforest walk on a very well made wooden path into the rainforest, keeping you high in the canopy at times. They had metal sculptures of insects and a snake to give you a visual of what you could expect (luckily the sculptures were not to scale or it could be pretty scary – Jurassic park kind of stuff). There was even one of the ”lovely” tree ant that Norma has painfully encountered twice now. The falls are extremely high and are used to generate power for Cairns. At this time of year there isn’t that much water coming over but you can imagine how impressive it must be in the wet season.

Wooden walkway

Rainforest flower

Barron Falls

There are several ways to get to Kuranda from Cairns. They run a shuttle bus, you can take the train or you can take the SkyRail or drive. The road isn’t long but is very steep and windy. We had experienced it coming back from the north so knew what to expect.

We can’t believe it but it is warm, DRY and sunny in Cairns. Our past two stays here were so very wet. The taxi driver told us it had been raining for the past two days but is due to be dry for a while now so we sure hope so as we have a day excursion planned for tomorrow.

To kill some time this afternoon we headed to the mall which is only a few blocks from here. We even found a Pandora shop so Norma now has a kangaroo and joey for her bracelet, a nice memento – thanks Doug. Tomorrow is our trip to the Great Barrier Reef.

Tonight and last night we had a glass of mango wine with dinner. It is made in Mareeba which we went through about 60 km from Cairns. It is sort of mangoey, I guess. . .