Deborah's travels: Kuranda

When I was small (maybe 10) we drove up the coast on a holiday, and went as far as Cairns. That was the last time I’ve been near this part of Australia. But we lived in Queensland, and I had been learning about this coastline in social studies. The Great Dividing Range goes all the way along the east coast of Australia, and in many places it is less than 50km from the coast - it even goes straight down into the ocean. Between the coast and the range is wetter than just about anywhere else in Australia. Mount Bartle Frere is the highest mountain in Queensland. The second highest, Mount Bellenden Ker is next to it, and has a weather station. They are both about sixty km from Cairns (to the south). Bellenden Ker holds several Australian rainfall records - the most rain in a month, the most in a year, the most in a calendar year… So where I am now is the wettest part of Australia. It’s also the Wet Tropics UNESCO World Heritage area, and the oldest tropical forest in the world, with the largest diversity of anywhere in the world, including the Amazon. It was originally part of the Gondwana rainforests. Trees grow from the tops of other trees, and some that I saw were three levels of tree.

In the 1880s gold was found in the rainforest - an area at the top of the range called the Atherton tablelands. Because it was so difficult to get there, they decided to build a railway line to it. It took five years, and is one of the engineering marvels of the world. By then, there wasn’t as much gold, but the railway line has always been a major tourist attraction. The town at the end of the 34km railway line is Kuranda, and on the way you pass the Barron Falls. There’s a hydroelectric dam at the top of the falls, so they don’t generally go at more than a trickle. My memory says that when I was young, they used to turn on the falls whenever the train went past, so tourists could see the falls. I always wanted to go on the train to see the falls. They don’t do it now, but in the wet season (not now), they are still spectacular.

Today I went up to Kuranda by train.

There I saw the Australian butterfly sanctuary,

before visiting Rainforestation Nature Park. Here, you can catch Army Ducks and wander around a set of rainforest tracks in a place that was a coffee plantation in the 1930s (then they had a frost and the coffee was wiped out). You’d never know it wasn’t always rainforest.

They also had traditional aboriginal dances and everyone got to throw a returning boomerang (aim at the birds not the worms). They also had Australian animals to pat or not, depending on the animal, and there was a wild cassowary wandering around.