Queensland:- Cairns

(18/9/2017 – 25/9/2017)

We left Port Douglas on Monday morning and followed the coast road down, just glorious views again looking out to sea!!!! Of course, we stopped for our mid morning cappuccinos!!! We arrived in Cairns and checked into Ingenia Cairns Coconut Holiday Resort for 7 nights!! Our Cape York travelling companions, Daniel and Stacey were also staying here and we managed to get a grassed site next to them. The kids were all very happy to see each other again!!! We unpacked and set up and then headed down to the pool for a late afternoon swim.

Well, I was impressed with the Big4 at Airlie Beach but this park was even better, just awesome. Mind you, this was the most expensive caravan park we have stayed at to date. Like Airlie Beach, they also had a weekly activities. They had 2 large lagoon pools (heated in winter and cooled in summer), children’s spa, adult’s spa, water splash park, 2 jumping pillows (one is the biggest in the southern hemisphere), a pushbike track, children’s playground, putt putt golf and other things such as badminton/volleyball court, bocce, large chess game, gymnasium, tennis court and a little kids play area. The amenities were very clean and plenty of them. They had a great camp kitchen too. Along with all the camping/caravan sites they had lots of cabins, villas and condos so there was a lot of traffic. There were a lot of kids riding around on the roads, so you had to be careful. Even though kids weren’t allowed to ride on the road, they still did!!!!

On Tuesday it poured rain all day. This was the worst day we have had since we left home. I found a place called Inflatable Kingdom so we took Mitchell there for a couple of hours in the afternoon. It was a great indoor activity for him to do and really good value too. Afterwards we had a drive around Cairns city before heading back to the resort.

On Thursday, we did the Kuranda Scenic Railway and Skyrail Rainforest Cableway. This was an awesome day out and I thoroughly recommend this. We drove to the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway’s Smithfield Terminal (40 minutes). We then got on a shuttle bus that drove us to Freshwater Station to meet up with the train. We caught the 9.50 am train and it took about 1 ½ hours to get up to Kuranda winding through the mountains and rainforest. We had about 3 ½ hours in Kuranda for lunch and we had a look around at all the Markets stalls and shops. We had lunch at the Barron Falls Hotel (busy spot but meals well worth the wait – big meals too!!!!). We then returned on the skyrail cablecar at 3.30 pm from Kuranda. We had a couple of stops, one at Barron Falls where we got to see the falls from a viewing area which were beautiful. The second stop was at Red Peak station where we did a short walk around the rainforest and then we returned back on the cable car. It took about 90 minutes to get back to the Smithfield terminal where we had our car parked there to drive back to the resort. The views from the cable car above the rain forest and down to the coast were absolutely spectacular!

This is a photo of the actual Skyrail Cablecar that we travelled in!!!!

On Friday morning we took Mitchell to the pool for some snorkelling lessons for the very first time (we bought him a snorkel set for his 5th birthday). He loved it and he did really well. We were thinking about going out to the Great Barrier Reef but we felt that Mitchell needed more practice snorkelling before taking him out to the reef.

On Saturday afternoon we drove out to Crystal Cascades which took about 30 minutes.

Crystal Cascades are a series of beautiful waterfalls and idyllic, croc free freshwater swimming holes. They are hidden in a tropical rainforest and surrounded by large impressive granite boulders. This area is part of the Barron Gorge National Park.

The area is accessed by a 1.2 km pathway through the rainforest. Just amazing!!!