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!

Catch of the day?

In Kerala's Fort Cochin, perhaps the biggest tourist attractions are the photogenic shore operated lift nets, or 'Chinese fishing nets'. They are big cantilevered contraptions, operated typically by six men, and through the day they lower and raise their big nets in the hope of catching an odd fish that has swum by. The fresh fish are usually sold there on the waterfront, and maybe cooked up straight away at a nearby restaurant.


It looks hard work, and often there's not a single fish in the net. So they go through the process several hundred times a day, and presumably make a living out of it.

There again, the fish are not the only catch. When we were invited onto one of them and got to watch the whole process from centre stage, it was a spectacular experience. When we were asked for a donation afterwards, we

complied willingly. It had been well worth the money, and from the fishermen's point of view we were probably the main catch. The single fish they pulled out that time wouldn't have fetched them very much.