Skyrail September 18
Thursday, June 1 - Late Afternoon
After leaving Kuranda we did not take the train back to Cairns. We took the Skyrail down. The skyrail was, until recently, the longest gondola ride in the world at about 8km long. It goes from the highlands around Kuranda down to Freshwater Station about 5 miles outside Cairns.
This was the station in Kuranda where we got on the gondolas. Its a nice smooth ride and moves pretty quick when you move from the slow station to the quicker skyrail cable.
This was just outside the station as we started to climb above the jungle.
This is a good view of the Barren River.
Looking straight down as we crossed the river.
Looking down the river and back down the cables towards the station and Kuranda.
Looking downa t the treetops. The trees up here wern’t as tall as some later in the tri, but they were still big and dense enough that we could not see the jungle floor.
This is a view from the jungle floor looking up towards the sun and you can see how dark it is. This was taken at the first of two stops that the skyrail makes. There are actually 3 sections of cable and you have to get off and switch gondolas between each section.
This was the original gondolas that were used to cross Barron Falls. They were only used to cross the falls, not to travel all of the way to Kuranda, but they were used to cross when building the rail bridges that the KSR still uses.
This is a view of the top of the Barron Falls. We did see some pictures at the Kuranda station, in the rainy season this looks almost like Niagara Falls but with a bigger drop. There wasn’t much action when we were there though.
You can see the trickle of water going over the falls here.
This is Kyle in the Jungle.
This is… hang on, right as Kyle was about to take this picture I heard something big rustling around in the leaves right behind me.
This was the monster. It looks like some sort of turkey. Yeah I know, it probably wasn’t going to eat me, but it was pretty big. It could have pecked me pretty hard I bet.
This is Kevin in the Jungle.
A view along the canopy.
As you can see they cables dipped quite a bit between the towers. This time it looked like we were going to hit some trees.
Here is a view near the falls and the afternoon train was just heading toards Kuranda and making its stop at the falls overlook.
Here is a close-up of the train. We were just there earlier in the day.
A neat picture, you can see the gondola shadow on the treetop. We were quite a ways up at this point.
This was a real good view of the falls. There wasn’t much action as you can see.