I think we’re finally adjusting appropriately to the time changes, and we awoke early for a trip into town and to grab a coffee. Sparrow was open again and we grabbed a quick cup and headed back to the hotel to get ready for the day. Today is the day I get to hold a koala!
I unpacked my real camera, and my customary Tilley hat, and we headed out into the rainforest. Well, we headed onto a tour bus anyway! We were joined by about ten others, and throughout the day we had a varying schedule of taking the SkyRail (a cable-car ride far above the rainforest canopy), heading into a village further along in the forest (think tourist mountain town surrounded by rainforest), then heading to a reserve called Rainforestation (quite literally the rainforest station). We’d finish our day with a train ride back from the town in the rainforest, and back to our tour bus.
Riding along the coast again in our tour bus… I think I’ve realized that Port Douglas, while fun and with an extremely beautiful beach, wasn’t the right place for this trip. We’d start off our day by again driving almost all the way back to Cairns to get to the SkyRail, and end our day on the train so close to Cairns that it’s the next stop after our disembarkation. From there, we’d drive all the way back to Port Douglas… so that we could leave at 3:15 a.m. the next morning to drive back to Cairns again and take the plane down to Melbourne. We’d end up spending a lot of time in the car driving to and from Cairns, just to do things right next to Cairns!
That aside though, we finished the drive to the rainforest and exited the bus for the SkyRail. The cable-car system climbed something like 150 feet in the air, and ascended with the mountains as we climbed and climbed. The three of us were joined by a woman who is a television personality for a station in India, and we shared some travel memories and discussions about what we were doing in Australia and why we were here. There were two stops along the way prior to the town in the rainforest, one for a “walk in the woods” style experience and one to take a look at some very impressive waterfalls. We walked both of these, and took pictures, but there wasn’t a great deal that stood out to me here. We would learn more at Rainforestation that I wish I had known at this point (like how ferns are some of the oldest plants and there are bushes that, if brushed against, end up with induced comas to get you through the recurring pain that lasts for weeks or months), but we didn’t encounter any trouble along the way. We did stay close to Christine, the television personality, for this portion of the trip… but we soon parted ways in the town and for the rest of the day.
Heading out onto the SkyRail
Riding the cable cars
In town, we meandered through the various shops and areas where tourists could easily be parted from their money, and we ended up in a small fudge shop selling 300+ flavors of fudge, including alcoholic fudge! We sampled a few, and looking at the itinerary, and thought we’d be back with plenty of time to buy the fudge later. We were definitely coming back! We thanked the very nice staff at the store, promised to return, and headed further into town. I was on a mission! The chance to hold a koala was somewhere nearby.
We trekked up a hill, and past the town information center, and found the koala and bird sanctuary/center, there were still spots available! While Jen peeled off to visit the birds, Jon and I bought our koala tickets, and meandered the marsupial pens for a while before getting in line for our photos.
The keeper wasn’t really very happy with the crowd, half were whistling at a koala in the pens, and a small child was banging on the wood post that formed the line over and over. She had to repeatedly call for calm and quiet. I was happy, though, that by the time I got to the front of the line things seemed to have calmed down. She positioned me, left arm under the koala and right arm up for a brace, and then there was a koala in my arms!!! The koala was a female one, and once given the chance with such a tall person (the trainer was rather short), she was up off of my left hand and climbing. The trainer grabbed her back again saying “Nope! He’s a fine tree, but stop climbing!”, and tried to hold the koala still as she climbed even higher, almost over my shoulder. It made the picture awkward, but I was having a ton of fun being scaled by this small, furry animal!
I’m holding a koala!
I laughed as they grabbed my picture, and just like that it was done and the koala was on her way back to the trainer and the next in line (Jon). I stayed to grab some pictures for him as well, and then we were on our way to catch up with Jen and meet our ride to Rainforestation.
The rest of the day almost deserves its own blog post, but this one is getting long already and I’ll try to summarize as the rest is more interesting in pictures than in words. We rode a retired US Army Duck, an amphibious vehicle that can drive both on land and in the water, we learned about the rainforest and the various ways in which plants and animals can kill you here (surprisingly, the most venomous spiders and snakes are not typically also the ones who can actually inject it into a human body, making them mostly harmless), and then we had lunch at the Rainforestation café.
I’ll stop here just for a minute to say that in one meal, I was able to enjoy some crocodile stew, and kangaroo shish kebabs. Now it’s a true Free Range Hobo vacation!
I tried it, it’s actually pretty tender and delicious!
Really does taste like chicken…
After lunch, more zoo-like attractions with crocodiles and lizards, and then we met with the aboriginal people at Rainforestation (who I’m pretty sure are just hired entertainers). We were taught about didgeridoos, spear throwing, and how to throw a boomerang. Oddly, I did just fine at the boomerang though I feel like I’ve done that before a time or two. You have to angle it a lot more steeply than you’d think, and you need to give it a great deal of room to come back to you. Mine stopped about five feet to the left of where we started, and it was one of the closest of the bunch.
A performance of historical culture
By now the day was getting long in the tooth, and we were about to head back to town and grab alcoholic fudge quickly before heading to the train… only to find out we were out of time! The bus was taking us directly to the train, with no time for fudge at all! I’m still extremely bummed about this, and as I’m writing this it’s nearly three full days later. Oh well… I’ll just have to come back some time!
We finished up the day in Port Douglas, grabbing dinner at Ironbar before calling it a night. We grabbed mixture of starters, burgers, and beer to celebrate our last night in the odd little town of Port Douglas. Tomorrow we’d be up early, headed for Melbourne, and on our way further South.
