The Kirks

After the Red Centre and “Wren” we flew to Cairns (the “Gateway to the Barrier Reef”). We stayed in Palm Cove, a tiny beach town on the 7th beach up from Cairns, which was a lot better than the city itself. Plenty of things to do, as we found, but we were rather restricted because it rained all week. (If it didn’t rain it was blowing a gale). And we were in the dry season! But, we did manage to get someplaces, like the Cairns Tropical Zoo (which was massively over scaled on the zoo map. However, we fed the Kangaroos (which had been fed so many times they just weren’t hungry for cardboardy pellets), and held a Koala (the claws hurt a lot)



We watched the dingoes sulking in their wooden tubes (oh yes, I forgot to mention, it was pouring).
Well, tropical, sorry, rainy Cairns also houses “Australia’s Number One Attraction”, the fantastic, the unforgettable, the touristy, the expensive, the one-and-only SKYRAIL! Take the 160-Aussie-dollar-ride to three stations, looking at the “abundance of different plants” (or, quoting Dad, “it’s all green to me”), and experience breathtaking views in the “only ride to Kuranda”. Of course, having been in Borneo, we expected Kuranda to be an aboriginal settlement with cultural houses and nothing much else. Of course, this being a tourist attraction, Kuranda turned out to be a small, modern town with hundreds of tourist shops (including a very nice ice-cream shop) and a road down to Cairns! Shocked as we were, we enjoyed it a lot, but may I mention that almost everywhere in Oz has “Australia’s Number One Attraction” (voted by the Oz Association of Notepads or something). Ironic, isn’t it?
Well, you might be wanting to know why we spent so long on attractions when we could have been visiting the reef? Well, the weather was on our side…… not. Unfortunately, everyday was windy and we couldn’t go.

We also went to Hartley’s Crocodile Adventures, a small park with a lot of crocodiles. Hartleys is a commercial farm, so the sign pointing to “farm tours” is a little misleading, it should really be “croc tours”. It’s very interesting here, and they told us lots of facts I for one never knew, such as temperature determines the sex of baby crocs (32C=Males, above of below 32C=Females), and that wild crocs have a very high infant mortality rate (2% crocs reach adulthood), but Hartley’s crocs have an extremely low infant mortality rate (98% crocs reach adulthood), and that the longest crocodile was 8.5 metres long! That’s longer than a minibus! Here is a picture of me having fun with the 8.5m crocodile. Flattering?



Luckily, the crocodile in the picture is made of fiberglass. But, they do have a crocodile show at Hartley’s where a man gets into a crocodile cage and tells you all about them. The crocodile (who was called “Bart”) looked pretty scary and the man in the cage had to jump about pretty quickly. In between escaping the jaws of death, he managed to tell us lots more interesting facts about crocodiles.



After all that slightly damp excitement in Cairns, we’re off to Sydney, home of the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and the 2000 Olympics. Should be fun.