Up the Mountain, down the Mountain!

Wed 23 September… The forecast for today was for a fairly hot and humid 34C so we thought we might head for the hills where it may be a bit cooler. We went up to Kuranda in the Barron Gorge National Park, but we didn’t drive, we went by Skyrail. Skyrail is a cable way with over 100 gondolas to take you up the mountain and above the rainforest for a distance of 7.5K’s Each gondola seats 6 people or 4 fatties, but mostly they only put 4 in a pod anyway. We went up with a couple of holidaymakers from Worcester , who by the end of the morning were seriously thinking of doing what we are doing. We gave them our email in case they do.
There are 2 stops on the way up to Kuranda where you can get out and wander around the boardwalk looking at rainforest (again!)The navigator loves them, Peter prefers the desert. Second stop in above the Barron Falls, another spectacular waterfall but viewed from a distance, The Gorge being too steep to get down to where there is a hydro-electric power station. In the old days they used to get up and down the slope on open sleds running on narrow gauge rails, the sleds attached by steel wire rope and hydraulics at the top to pull them up. Pictures to follow it must have been a really scary ride. Kuranda is a small village up in the hills and is geared for tourism, mostly shops selling plastic boomerangs, hats with corks, t-shirts, bangles and beads and sundry Oz tat ( the equivalent to Euro tat) There were a couple of art galleries, one particular one that specialised in photography. It was interesting to see photos of many of the beautiful places we have visited and we compared them with our snaps. How they managed to photograph without tourists heads bobbing about in them is anyone’s guess, fantastic pictures but very expensive, some in excess of $2,000.
We had lunch in Kuranda then a beer in an Irish bar of all places, it’s quite amazing how we keep stumbling across them. So later we travelled the 7.5K’s back down the hill with magnificent views out towards Cairns and the Barrier reef. We could have gone up and down all day long.