Michael and I got up early to watch the ship sail into Cairns harbor. We were in rain squalls, some quite severe. Every so often we could see the city emerge from the clouds. It's hard to believe that I am on the other side of the world visiting a port that is on the edge of true wilderness!
We wanted to take a railroad tour into the nearby mountains but the weather did not cooperate. In addition to our late arrival due to picking up the folks who visited the reef yesterday, the severe rain caused the tour operator to cancel this tour. We were not interested in the tour to the crocodile preserve, about the only one not canceled. We walked into town and visited the local tourist information center. All the alternative trips to the mountains were in danger of cancellation too. Cairns was expecting a "cyclone" (the Asian version of a hurricane.) We obtained information on the local bus to the relatively nearby Botanical Gardens. As there was an hour wait, we walked to the train station to check it out. Ten years or so ago the original station had been sold off for development as a shopping mall. A new station has been built behind the original. It is actually a rather small affair with a small ticket office, only two tracks and simple platforms that looked more like an above ground subway station than anything else. Michael had a nice conversation with a gentleman who turned out to be a railway porter. He told us the history of the station. The major local industry is growing sugar cane. The raw cane is turned into syrup and shipped south by freight cars so most rail traffic is freight. There are two trains a day from Brisbane, 400 miles to the south, and two tourist trains to Karunda in the mountains to the north. It was the tourist trains that had been canceled due to expected rain and high wind.
When the porter heard we were going to take the bus to the Botanical Garden he lead us to the bus stand in the adjacent rail/shopping mall garage. There he introduced us to a van driver who offered a tour of Cairns for $20. It was a hop on, hop off tour with seven or eight stops, one off which was the Botanical Gardens.
It had stopped raining so we had an interesting tour of the city. Most of the development of the downtown area is relatively recent. Michael visited about 20 years ago when the town was a sleepy backwater with a few tourist stores. Now there is a fancy new marina, high end hotels, a casino and streets and streets of tee shirt and souvenir shops. Most of the older buildings have given way to cement and steel structures. According to the guide, there was once a bar on every corner. Cairns was founded in the late 1800's as a gold rush jumping off point when gold was discovered in the nearby mountains. I took some pictures of older structures. One of the most interesting was a bar in the shape of a crocodile.
We got off the van at the Botanical Gardens. These are relatively small but very well thought out. We walked through an area of less than twenty acres yet it appeared we were engulfed in wilderness. Across the street there was a rainforest walk through several hundred acres of vestigial rainforest. The original Cairns was built on land reclaimed from mangrove swamp and tropical rainforest. This preserve is all that is left. The rainforest walk was wonderful; probably better than the one on the mountain that had been canceled.
There were boardwalk paths through at last four different habitats all wet and beautiful in their own ways. The boardwalk ended at contrasting salt water and freshwater ponds.
We got the tour van back to Cairns on the next hourly swing. Both times we were the only passengers so we benefited from a very personalized tour. Our guide/driver was very personable and friendly. He is probably the local equivalent of a "red neck" in that his opinions of the Aboriginal population were unflattering in the extreme. I'm not sure his stories of cannibals were not all true.
We ended our tour at the shore side casino and walked back to the ship for lunch. I still had not seen a koala so after lunch we went back to the casino which featured a rooftop animal preserve. By the time we got there all the daily programs had finished. We could have spent $60 to walk through and view the animals but, much as I would have liked to see koalas, kangaroos etc, that was too much. I'll be able to say that I visited Australia without seeing any of the indigenous wildlife except birds and bats. See the bats hanging from what looks like a banyan tree.
I did buy an Australian tee shirt. I wanted an Australian flag beach towel but they were all made in China and of such poor quality that I feared they would come apart with the first washing. I snapped several pictures of a souvenir store that sold nothing but Chinese lucky cats, all made in Japan.
The sail out from Cairns was really something. The rain held off until we cleared the harbor. The harbor is very shallow and the ship passage is marked by red and green beacons. It appeared as if we were heading down a runway or following the landing lights from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was seemingly unreal leaving this city on the edge of the world.
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