Kuranda - it's all in the journey!

Kuranda is a nice little tourist town up on the Dividing Range just above Cairns. You spend an hour or two in the tourist shops. You argue with the ice cream lady with the almost-Tasmanian customer service skills, who seems quite determined to sell you the chocolate ice cream when you tell her several times it's the cookies-and-cream one you want.


But really the day is about the getting up there, and the getting down again.

The Kuranda Scenic Railway is a fine institution. It's magnificently engineered, with its 13 tunnels and 45 bridges (or vice versa or something like that), and its 328m ascent. It used to be a a major link in Queensland's rail system, but now it just keeps us tourists happily occupied. It's over 100 years old, and the stations are extremely historic and attractive.

We went up to Kuranda by the train, and came back down on the Skyrail cable car thing. This is quite impressive too, being 7.5km long and giving you great views of the rainforest below. You get out at a couple of places along the way, and do little rainforest walks.

Even the least intrepid of adventure travellers seem to survive the trip well!

Bleichert's ropey old ropeway

It operated for a mere nine months or so, before breaking up and falling in a heap on the valley floor. Its sad and rusty relics are still there after 125 years, largely out of sight and overgrown in the Blue Mountains bush.

Bleichert's Aerial Ropeway was erected in 1889 to carry kerosine shale rock from mines in the Ruined Castle area out to what's now the Scenic Railway area near Katoomba. It was state-of-the-art equipment built in Germany by Adolf Bleichert & Co. The Katoomba Coal & Shale Co. was no doubt very proud of its mighty machine, with its dozens of big buckets, innovative systems of cables, cogs, tensioning and braking mechanisms, and more.



 (Our GPS trace map courtesy of Paul Ma)




See the survey report of the Blue Mountains Heritage Institute for more on it, and on the cataloguing of its bits:
 http://www.bmwhi.org.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Final-Report-Bleichert-Ropeway-Survey-2015-.compressed.pdf   You may also be able to work out exactly how it all fitted together too. We couldn't, having seen up close all kinds of strange arrangements, with cables in rock grooves, for instance.




My Thursday Survey bushwalking group decided it was time to explore all this the other day. We expected a very arduous bush bash, with cliffs and chasms, impenetrable vegetation, and severe navigational challenges. But it wasn't actually that hard. There are often orange marker ribbons, and for much of the 3km route you're actually in sight of bits of cable, or buckets or other junk. It's a dead straight line of course, though that doesn't always help as much as you think it should, when you're in dense bush and there are varying slopes and ascents and descents of hundreds of metres.

Having made it through to the Ruined Castle track, we followed this back around to Scenic World, and some of our members took the easy way up. (Some of us didn't  and nearly beat them back anyway!)

A thoroughly satisfying and interesting little outing.





I hope the engineer who did the original loading calculations never got to work on anything important again!