Kuranda Scenic Railway

car 7

car 6

Joelle receives a call from work and says, sorry, I'm off call for the next 3 weeks, YES!!! 

GG hanging out enjoying the ride

Hey Papa, look at me!!!

Joelle running to get Big Ben. "Ben, you need to stay with us..."

Lunch at the station

Skyrail down

Rainforest below Skyrail

Waking at 7am, feeling human again, we decided to embark on an adventure:  the Kuranda Scenic Railway and Skyrail.  Kuranda is a small tourist village 334km above sealevel and ??km from Cairns.  The train has a scheduled departure time of 9:30am.  We arrived at the station at 9:20am.  Scrambling to find parking for the caravan (clearance of 3.4m required), we ran to the office to buy our tickets.  We misread them and told the guide we were in train 7.  Not looking at them, she escorted us to train 7 – the Gold Carriage!!  About 20 minutes into the ride, we realized we really weren’t supposed to be there.  We showed our tickets to the train personnel and instead of bringing us up to train 3 (budget class we had bought), he stopped at train 6 because it was mostly empty.  Train 6 was also a gold carriage!!  So we rode the next hour and a half in luxury, able to amble up down at our leisure.  The ride was beautiful with breathtaking views of waterfalls, mountains and valleys and the ocean.

At Kuranda, we had lunch and walked a little ways into the village.  We then took the Skyrail down – this is essentially a gondola.  It took 40 minutes to get down.  At the bottom, our luck was still on our side as we caught a bus back to Cairns (18km away), which wasn’t scheduled to go there, but took us anyway.  We spent the rest of the day exploring the caravan park. Unfortunately, that night was Rob’s turn to experience the stomach flu.  Curse that daycare of Bennett’s because he was the first to get it last week.