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!

A stairway to ....... Kunanyi

Or Mount Wellington, as it used to be called.

They changed the name on me while I was away. It's still the same magnificent old mountain though, dominating Hobart's scenery and beckoning bushwalkers like me.

One of the first priorities during my recent Tasmanian trip was the Wellington Pinnacle pilgrimage. I went up from The Springs to the Pinnacle, via the Zigzag Track, and down by the South Wellington and Icehouse Tracks.









It's nice up there. Fragrant botanical smells, blue skies and bracing breeze. Excellent views too across all of Hobart, and much of southern Tasmania, including the Tasman Peninsula and the main peaks in the South West wilderness.

The observation shelter is still there. Looking as ever like the cable car turn-around station that I half believe it was originally meant to double as. Every few years somebody cooks up yet another cable car or chairlift plan, probably hoping the taxpayers will build it for them to make private profit out of. Nothing doing there yet though.