Cairns

I am staying in a small town on the east coast of australia called Port Douglas, Queensland which is about one hour north of Cairns in a lovely resort with a swim up pool to my suite. The town of Port Douglas reminds me of Carmel California except Port Douglas is located on the breath taking 4 mile beach

4 mile beach - 3 minutes walk from my resort

I travelled to cairns to take the sky rail to Kuranda. The kuranda sky rail is 7.5km long which travels over an ancient tropical rainforest that has been designated as a world heritage site. From this view the rainforest canopy is amazing. The sky rail gives an opportunity to view the Barron Falls and Gorge. The falls decends from the Atherton Tables to Cairns and supplies the Barron Gorge Hydroelectric Station. In the wet season December, January and February it is said the falls are spectacular - I thought they were pretty amazing in June. The following are views from the cable car:

The sky rail ends at kuranda which is a cute little town with lots of restaurants, cafes, souvenIr shops and was fun to spend a couple of hours exploring. I then caught the kuranda train to make the 34km journey back to cairns. The kuranda rail is considered an engineering feat of tremendous magnitude given the terrain it covers. The rail was built between 1882-1891 and consists of 15 hand made tunnels, 37 bridges and rises 328 meters from sea level. Many men lost their lives during the construction of the rail.

Sugar cane fields about to be harvested

Today I took a tour to the Daintree Forest. It is the oldest tropical forest in the world. We first took a river boat cruise and spotted a couple of crocodiles. We then went to the town of Daintree to have some delicious scones and Devonshire cream - tea and cakes are very popular in Queensland. We then headed further into the Daintree Forest but first we had to ditch the van in favour of a 4W drive landrover to enjoy my first off road experience. The guide told us to hang on to the bars and he was not kidding! After a few kilometers through creeks and trails in the forest we came to a beautiful waterfall and waterhole for a swim. As you can see by the pictures I was attempting to get into the freezing water - that was until I saw the fresh water eel and I changed my mind - only got wet to the thighs. Our tour guide told us ther are seven varieties of the most venomous snakes in this rainforest area - luckily we did not meet any!

This evening I went for a sunset cruise on a 62 foot catamaran called Aquarius. This boat is like one of those in the inner harbour and you only wish you could go for a sail on it. Tonight it turned quite cool and windy so a number of people backed out of the sail leaving only 8 of us on this huge boat to enjoy drinks, appy's, sunset and 22knot winds giving us an exciting sail. I even took my turn at the wheel - or at least i pretended to.