Cairns - Kuranda with photos

We arrived in Cairns yesterday, we flew in on Virgin Blue, which I recommend. We are staying at the Hilton and they are really treating me like a VIP (I have my gold Hilton Honors card) and this is a comped stay. They sent up a nice bottle of Shiraz and a tray of fancy Hors D'Ouevres when I first got here. Put us in a nice room on the executive floor with a view of the bay and breakfast and cocktails in the lounge daily.

Today we went to Kuranda which is a town up in the mountains of a rainforest. You take an old train up the mountain to get there, through the tropical rainforest. At the top is a village, touristy yes, but fun.

First we went to the butterfly sanctuary. The butterflies were magnificent and sometimes they would land on you, or you could pick them up. One butterfly was on my finger for a long time, and some greenish stuff came out of its butt and then it sucked it up again. It did this a couple of times and the lady that works there said it was because it liked the salty taste of my finger but needed moisture to be able to get the salt. It also supposedly helped the male butterfly with its sex hormones!

We also went to Birdland, an aviary up there. Some of the birds were tame and you could hold them, if you had food they wanted. The birds were very colorful and we got some great photos.

Finally we got the big tourist to OZ prize, photos of use holding Koala Bears. They are really cute, but they smell pretty bad, like musky animal scent and eucalyptus. Their claws are really sharp too, but they are really sweet and docile. The one we held was called Hamilton and he was the father of a baby that we saw.
The way we got down the mountain was incredible but kind of scary. It was in gondolas, buckets like they used to have at Disneyland but over the rain forest really high up. It was beautiful and I had to keep thinking about that instead of how scared I was. You can see in this photo how spectacular the view was.

It's warm here, but a little windy and cloudy. Not great conditions to go the reef. We are hoping it clears up while we are here.