Visiting the Kuranda Rainforest in Australia
To kickstart my Australia trip, I wasted no time hanging around. My first flight was from NYC to Vancouver, Canada. I left NYC on 1/1 at 7PM and arrived in Vancouver 6 hours later, or 9:40PM local time. It's funny thinking that was the short leg of the trip. Whenever I fly from NYC to Seattle, or my family comes to visit, I always think it's such a long flight and how crappy it feels. But, since I was flying halfway around the world to Australia, this first leg felt like no big deal. From Vancouver, I flew to Brisbane. In addition to being delayed about 2 hours, the flight itself took about 15 hours. Luckily, it was an overnight flight, so I had planned to sleep for the majority of it. Unluckily, the eight-year-old in the row in front of me had different plans and didn't allow anyone on the plane to sleep. She was so loud that numerous doctors who were on the flight came by to offer assistance to the mother, thinking the child may have been sick or something. I had earplugs in, but at such close proximity, I really only fell asleep after wrapping my thick jacket around my head and creating a cocoon to block out the noise. After landing in Brisbane, I still had one more flight to get to Cairns, just a short 2.5 hours flight. In total, I left NYC on 1/1 at 7PM and arrived in Cairns on 1/3 at 3:30PM. I will never again complain about flying from NYC to Seattle.
I spent my first afternoon and night in Cairns just walking around the town, which was very small. Even though it was summer, it rained the entire time I was in Cairns. And it was so humid! But funny enough, the town had the best ice cream I had all trip. And I ate a lot of ice cream in those three weeks. Here are a few pictures from walking around the town:
On my first full day in Cairns, I was off on a tour bright and early at 7:30AM. I wanted something a little bit more chill for my first day since I had no idea if I would be super jetlagged or not. I was actually pretty ok, probably running off the fact of "I have 3 weeks, let's get started!" So, for my first day, I signed up for a Kuranda Rainforest Tour. We started by taking a scenic train ride up the mountain to reach Kuranda Village. Some pictures from before at the train station and during the train ride.
A little over two hours later, we arrived at Kuranda Village. It was a very cute village, but certainly meant for tourists. I started out with some ice cream, then walked around the village, looking into the shops, eateries, and just enjoying the walk. Some more pictures from walking around.
One of the main reasons I wanted to visit Kuranda was because of the koalas! Inside the Kuranda Village, there are 3 parks: the Australian Buttefly Sanctuary, Birdworld Kuranda, and Kuranda Koala Gardens. While I knew that I'd have the chance to visit many other parks with koalas and kangaroos, Koala Gardens is one of the few parks in Australia that actually allows you to hold a koala for a picture rather than just standing next to it. So when I got to the Village after the train ride, I was super excited to head to the Koala Gardens. Walking in, we can see kangaroos right away. They're free to roam large areas of the park, and if you buy a small container of food for $2, they'll come right up to you and eat from your hands. I didn't buy any food at this particular park because there were a lot of people and children around. The kangaroos, especially the joeys (babies) looked terrified of all the children screaming and running around. A number of them were hidden under the foot bridge, so I didn't want to try to draw them out. Some of the adult kangaroos were roaming around, but seemed to have eaten too much by that point to bother going up to people for more. So I stayed around them for a bit, petted a few, and moved on to the koalas.
There were far more koalas than I'd expected at the park. I asked one of the rangers who was feeding one about the pictures, and she told me that each koala is only allowed to work 30 minutes per day, 3 times per week. That's the life! And also why they had so many. So I got in line with my little koala keychain which served as my ticket for taking a picture with a koala, and soon I was holding a little 4-year-old cuddle bug. She was so much heavier than I expected!! But super sweet, fluffy, and calm. In about 20 seconds, the photographer had taken a number of pictures and I had to give her back, even though I really didn't want to.
The rest of the day was a lot slower. I walked around the village some more, tried a traditional kangaroo meat pie (didn't like it), and headed back to the exit. On the way to the Kuranda Village, we'd taken the scenic train ride, approximately 2.5 hours. On the way back, I was taking the cable car back down to the train station, the other thing I'd been really looking forward to in the Kuranda Village. The cable car line was split into 3 sections of about 7-10 minutes each. And it was high up! Like really high up. You know you're up high when the birds are flying under your cable car. But it was an incredible view of the forest, the city and sea far away. The videos below are pretty long, but very pretty views of the forest. For the second and third line, I set up my GoPro to film all the way down. At each stop, I walked around a bit through the boardwalks in the forest, saw some waterfalls, and some incredible, hundreds of years old trees.
All in all, the tour to Kuranda was absolutely worth it. The Village itself is really for tourists to spend money, which I was very proud of myself for not partaking. But the chance to hold a koala and the cable car scenery made the early first day totally worth it.
