Day 4 - Kuranda

4/9/07 – Monday
Today we went on a tour of an area about 20 minutes from our hotel called Kuranda. We went up a skyrail “gondola” taking 2 stops along the way for tours of the beautiful rainforest. We were just in awe of the beauty there!! We saw some waterfalls that were just gorgeous!! After we reached the top we visited the Butterfly Sanctuary where there were butterflies EVERYwhere! They like bright colors and lucky for Allie, she was wearing a hot pink shirt, so several of them landed on her and she loved it! Adysen had the complete opposite reaction and got freaked out every time a butterfly came near her!  She liked the dead ones in the glass cases the best. Kelsey was somewhere in between. One was brave enough to land on her and she wasn’t sure if she liked it or not! It was an incredible experience!

Next, we experienced the Koala Gardens and Kelsey and Allie actually got to hold a Koala! Adysen had to use the restroom right before it was our turn, so she missed out on the photo op. Probably better anyway as she wasn’t much more thrilled about getting close to the Koala than she was about the butterflies touching her!! We got to feed some kangaroos and see some more crocodiles. We also saw a Wombat which was an interesting looking creature!

After that, we walked around the village of Kuranda looking at shops and eating lunch.Jason ordered a Kangaroo burger for lunch and we all had a taste. It didn't taste much different than regular hamburger meat to me, but it was tasty! Kelsey’s favorite part was the shopping of course! She always finds pleasure in that no matter where we go! Adysen spent her money on a kangaroo skin coin purse and Allie found a Kangaroo skin notebook that she is going to use to write down “special things”.

The weather was just like you’d expect for a rainforest… rainy! It would rain for a few minutes and then stop and start again later. The tours had umbrellas to provide and we also had some in our backpack that came in very handy! The temperatures have been just perfect since we have been here! Warm enough to swim, but cool enough that we are not miserable. We even have gotten chilly at times especially with the breeze blowing in the cool rainforest!

We came back to our hotel this evening and ate some snacks/dinner stuff that we had purchased at the grocery store yesterday. We found some yummy fancy cheeses, pesto, crackers and those kinds of things that we can’t get in our commissary in Guam, so they were a treat for us! Since our hotel room has a kitchen in it, we thought we’d try to save some money by eating here at times, but we’ve been too busy to do it much.