This 1200+ Kilometer trip to Cairns was our third trip there. There are a number of Photo’s here on this website of our trips up along the coast to get to Cairns. The first time was in December 2023 when we took our Caravan up along the coast exploring. We spent a couple days in Cairns. Later, in June 2025, we again went to Cairns and spent a day or two there as we prepared to travel the Savannah Hiway across Northern Queensland. You can find both of those in the menu.
This trip was for the purpose of meeting some long time friends who were on a tour of Australia and FiJi and had a three day stop in Cairns. They spent the first day with their tour group and explored the Great Barrier Reef which lies just off the coast by Cairns. They told us they had a great time and got to see a lot of coral, fish, and ocean. We met them, we stayed at the same hotel, the evening of their first day when they got back from their tour. We had dinner and discussed our plans for them over the next two days.
They had not seen much of the interior of Australia so we booked all of us on the 7.5 kilometer long Rainforest Cableway that leaves Cairns and lifts the riders over the vast rainforests, mountains, and waterways, and arrives some two and a half hours later in a small mountain town called Kuranda. For the return we booked the scenic Kuranda Scenic Railway from Kuranda back to Cairns, another scenic two hour ride.
While at the top of the mountain range we toured the village of Kuranda and spent spend several hours at The Rainforest Nature Park. which included a small zoo featuring Australian animals, a Duck boat ride which toured through the rainforest at the eye level, an Aboriginal dance demonstration, an aboriginal Didgeridoo performance, and a spear throwing demonstration.
Fred and Francis live in New Mexico and have discovered the joy of traveling. When we heard they were coming through Australia we worked out a plan to spend a couple days with them. We first got to know Fred and Francis during my first assignment to Scott AFB in 1983. I didn’t work with Fred but Nancy and Francis traveled the same volunteer and social circles and the four of us were often at official and social events. Over the years Nancy and I would stop by and see them when we were traveling and we kept in contact through mail. NAncy and I were delighted we would get a chance to see them once more and show them some of Australia.
Nancy and I took two days to get to Cairns. While we have seen the sights along the way a couple times, everything changes as well as seasons so it is always interesting to make the drive. We spent our first night in a little town called Ayr (Pronounced air) and made it to Cairns the next day.
When we met in the late afternoon, we did a little catch up then got to the important stuff … dinner. As they were not familiar with the local area they asked if we could recommend a place to have dinner. We recommended a nearby RSL club. RSL stands for “Returned & Services League of Australia” … don’t ask me what all that stands for, Australians come up with the interesting names for stuff!. It is much like the US’s Veterans Clubs or American legion. The difference is that Nancy and I found if there is an RSL in town, it is one of the better places to eat. They are well run, serve great food, and are decently priced. They run from small restaurant/bar type places in smaller towns to very large clubs with different venues for eating or social interaction. We had enjoyed dinner at the RSL in Ayr and figured the much larger one in Cairns would be good … and it was.
The plan we proposed to Fred and Francis was to spend the next day riding the Cableway up to Kuranda, spend two or three hours there, and take the train back to Cairns. We would start out early and finish up late afternoon. The next day, we proposed to take a drive farther north to Port Douglas which is a small coastal town about seventy five kilometers north of Cairns. They wanted to see some rural Australia and when you proceed north out of Cairns, that’s rural Australia. Most of the east coast, especially the northern part of Australia is quite tropical so you don’t see the bleached desert everyone thinks of when they hear “outback” but it is considered outback. They thought the plan was great so that’s what we did.
I do not have many pictures of our two days. As I mentioned, we have been in Cairns before and have posted a quite a few pictures of the Cairns area in the posts I mentioned earlier. So, what I am going to do is load the pictures I did take, add captions to them, and you can fit them in along our trip.
We did go a little farther North but the road kinda petered out so we returned. I didn’t get many pictures in Port Douglas but we had lunch there, starting with Crocodile appetizers… mmmm. All in all it was a wonderful two day experience for all of us. Fred and Francis got to see much of Australia they will not see on a tour and Nancy and I did some things we hadn’t done before and got to spend some quality time with friends. Always a winner.
