From Sydney we flew up north to Cairns in Queensland and then took a bus to our hotel in Port Douglas, an hour east of Cairns. The next day we came back to Cairns to catch a train on the Kuranda Scenic Railway.
It was at this point that I discovered that my brand-new Nikon E5700 digital camera was no longer working. To get it fixed I would have to ship it to the Nikon service center in Torrance, California, and that obviously had to wait until I got home. Fortunately I had a backup – my trusty Olympus OM-1 film camera. So I pressed it into service for the rest of the trip. Unfortunately, some of the film that I used on the Kuranda trip and subsequent peregrinations in Australia seems to have deteriorated over time, and maybe wasn’t the best to begin with, so the photos on this page are not up to the quality of those taken in Sydney; they range from rather grainy to wretchedly murky or blurry.
As soon as the train leaves the station in Cairns, it starts to climb up into the hills, approximately following the course of the Barron River for most of the way. It enters a dense rain forest, which crowds closely along the railroad tracks. The railroad was originally built in 1891 and runs 37 kilometers, or 25 miles, through the jungle and the mountains until it reaches Kuranda on the Atherton Plateau. Many tunnels and bridges had to be built to accommodate the railroad, and the construction is said to have cost many lives. The route is subject to rock falls and in 2010 had to be closed for repairs for several months after 5 passengers were injured when the train was derailed by a landslide.
The train passes through the spectacular gorge of the Barron River, and as it nears Kuranda it stops at a lookout, with a sweeping view of Barron Falls. There we were able to disembark for a few minutes and take pictures of the gorge and falls unobstructed by the train windows. The flow of water over Barron Falls is somewhat restricted by a dam, which also provides hydroelectric power to the area, so that for most of the year it is a mere trickle and only reaches full volume after a heavy rain during the wet season; we were there during the dry season. It was a spectacular view nonetheless.
After a two-hour ride, we arrived at the village of Kuranda, where we explored the shops, enjoyed the slightly quaint, thoroughly pleasant late 19th/early 20th-century ambience, ate lunch and bought a few souvenirs. I got a boomerang and a didgeridoo, and a sturdy long-sleeved shirt to protect my skin from the fierce Queensland sun.
After sampling the delights of Kuranda, we headed back to Cairns. We did so on a different mode of transport from the one we had taken to get there: the Skyrail aerial tram. This took us above the impenetrable jungle and gave us some more spectacular views of Barron Gorge, the falls and the river, and also made a couple of stops where we could get off and descend into the rain forest to view the magnificent trees and abundant foliage.
The Skyrail runs above the Queensland Wet Tropical Forest, the world’s oldest tropical rainforest, even older than the Amazon. There are unsubstantiated rumors that dinosaurs still roam its unexplored depths. The Skyrail was completed in 1995, and it was the world’s longest gondola cableway at the time. Helicopters had to be used to construct the cable towers, because there were no roads in the rain forest, and all efforts to build roads there failed because the construction crews were eaten by T. rexes.
