Back to Cairns and the Tropical Rainforest

On Monday, April 16, Christine and I made a day trip to the tropical rainforest village of Kuranda a bit north of Cairns. We traveled a good part of the way via the the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway, which was until very recently the longest gondola cableway in the world, spanning 7.5km over a tropical rainforest canopy.


Here I am during the first leg of the trip on the Skyrail, leaving the valley far below.


Climbing up into the rainforest.


Video of Skyrail


An exceptionally large "Golden Orb" spider we spotted on our first stop along the Skyrail. This beast was nearly 8 inches across. Again, seeing as this is Australia, I can only assume it's deadly.


Christine and me at a lookout at Red Peak Station, the first stop-off point along the Skyrail.


Our view out over Barron Falls


Back on the Skyrail for the next leg of our journey.


Christine in the gondola


Me and Christine at the Barron Falls Station, our second and last stop-off before reaching Kuranda.


Another view of Barron Falls (gorgeous, no?)


Supremely uneventful video of Barron Falls


At Barron Falls Station, we spotted this cassowary in the shrubs. A cassowary is a large, flightless bird very similar to the emu. I did not know this at the time, nor did I know that the Guiness World Records lists the cassowary as the world's most dangerous bird. To further illustrate this point, here's an excerpt from Bill Bryson's "In a Sunburned Country," a book I just finished reading about his travels in Australia. In this passage, Mr. Bryson is discussing Daintree National Park, located a little bit north of Kuranda (where we were at the time):

“This is one of the few remaining places where you can hope to see cassowaries. They look much like emus except that they have a bony growth on their head called a casque and the infamous murderous claw on each foot. They attack by jumping up and striking out with both feet together. Fortunately this doesn’t happen very often. The last fatal attack was in 1926, when a cassowary charged a sixteen-year-old boy who had been taunting it and sliced open his jugular vein as it bounded across him. The reason attacks are so few is that cassowaries are exceedingly reclusive and now, alas, very few in number. No more than a thousand of them survive.”

What is particularly troublesome about this report is that the reason attacks are uncommon is not because they're unlikely to occur, but rather because this bird is so exceedingly rare so interactions with humans simply don't happen. Needless to say, I exercised no prudence whatsoever in getting ridiculously close to this potentially lethal bird and capturing the following video:



Happily, we survived the encounter and continued our journey to Kuranda. I don't actually have any worthwhile photos of this village high in the rainforest, as the rain poured down on us for most of the time we were there. At least we got the authentic "rainforest" experience. ;-)

Next up, Brisbane!