Kosher Travel with Fran and David: Australia Part 3

Well, we have had a very exciting busy three days in Cairn. First a bit of description.

Cairns is a city of about 120,000 people and it is situated about a 3 hour flight north of Brisbane. Being much closer to the equator it is a hot humid area, very tropical .

Which means that in the summer you can get tropical downpours without much notice .

The forecast for the three days was thunderstorms for the first two and cloudy with possible showers for the third. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Every day was very hot and humid; but mostly sunny with short tropical showers.

We stayed in a great bed and breakfast place...It was just north of the city limits of Cairns and right in the middle of the rainforest with a waterfall and creek running right next to your bedroom. It was like out of a movie.

The couple who run the place, Ivan and Lorena, originally from Hamilton Ontario, went out of their way to get us kosher food (lox, cream cheese, bagels etc) and even provided a new cutting board and knives ( they learned that from the research that they did on the web).

It is not hard eating kosher in Cairns; bread and bagels, smoked and cooked salmon, canned fish, herring and rollmops, hommous and other kinds of locally produced Israeli spreads, cream cheese, jam and peanut butter and of course lots of fresh fruits and veggies are available almost everywhere...we are certainly not starving!!! And most of the places that we have rented have a full kitchen or a kitchenette.

When we arrived in Cairns we immediately headed for the Skyrail which is a ski lift that takes you up into the mountains and the tropical rainforest (needless to say, there is no skiing in this area as even in the winter the temperatures are quite high). The length of this chairlift is about 7 kms and there are stations along the way where you can get off and hike in the rainforest or hear interpretations by a forest ranger or see beautiful vistas and waterfalls.

At the top, you are in a village called Kuranda which is quite touristy ...Fran and I visited the butterfly sanctuary there which was quite interesting and beautiful.

For a change of pace, getting down from the mountain was by a vintage railway which was built 100 years ago and which hugged the cliffs as it descended.

Then it was back to the B & B for dinner and a swim in the refreshing pool at the B & B.

On Tuesday morning, we got up very early and drove due north for two and a half hours to a place called Cape Tribulation which is literally where the paved road ends!!!

The only way to go further along the coast is by 4 wheeler jeep along dirt and gravel roads. This place was named by Captain Cook (in addition to Mount Sorrow and Mount Misery) because of all the trials and tribulations that he faced when he found the area way back when.

It really is a very natural place, untouched and unchanged over the years. You are here to explore and experience nature. We went up for two attractions ...the first was something called Jungle Surfing... Take a look at it on Google and Youtube and you will what this is...you climb up in a tree to a height of about 12 meters and then you move from tree to tree by zipline for a distance of hundreds of meters and all the time you are ending up higher from the forest floor till you are zipping along about 40 or 50 meters up, which is about the equivalent of 15 stories!!! It was amazing. Irving and Ruchama did the last stage upside down!!!

After a well earned lunch we went to a fruit farm, totally organic, started by a husband and wife team, former teachers from Melbourne who were tired of city life and decided to leave for the wilderness.

From scratch, they now grow more than 150 different kinds of fruit most of which you have never tasted or heard of. We sat thru a most interesting discussion of the different kinds of fruit, the challenges of growing them and then we had a tasting of many of the fruit. Delicious and fascinating!!!

On Wednesday we went for a half day cruise on the Great Barrier Reef and saw the sea life in a submarine and glass bottom boat as well as snorkeling in the warm water in the reef. It is really not to me missed when you are in this part of the world.