Saturday – November 10, 2018
We set our alarm for 5:30AM so we could have time for breakfast and meet the tour group in the lobby by 7:30. The Shangri-La Hotel in Cairns is a lovely comfortable place to stay and I wish I could have spent more time there. We all checked out and rode the coach up the mountain into the rainforest to the village of Kuranda.
We walked through the village to the Skysail Rainforest Cableway. It was too early and all the shops in town were closed. The Cableway is a 7.5 km scenic ride above the Barron Gorge National Park in the tropics of Queensland’s World Heritage Area north of Cairns.
The Cableway travels over the world’s oldest continually surviving rainforest on earth. It was the longest cableway in the world when it was completed in 1995.
Six-person gondolas travel through the McAlister Range of mountains over the canopy of the rainforest trees. It takes about 45 minutes to travel the entire distance one-way. The developers established an agreement with the Djabugay Tribal Aboriginal Community for protection of Aboriginal cultural heritage. The cableway was built by helicopters so the ancient rainforest would not be disturbed.
The coach bus met us at the end of the Cableway and drove us to Cairns Airport to go to Sydney. The “Airport Tour of Australia” continues!!
We arrived at Sydney Airport at 4:00pm and were driven to the Four Seasons Hotel on Circular Quay in downtown Sydney. We checked in and had the rest of the day and evening to ourselves.
The Sydney Opera House is across the Quay and looks beautiful at night:
