The breakfast buffet was a good spread - but the hot dishes (eggs, pancakes, etc.) weren't worth the extra $5.

The honey for tea was dripping off a fresh hunk of honeycomb, running down a silver trough into a serving bowl.  Nicely decadent.

Had fresh passion fruit - good stuff.  You eat the seeds -- more accurately you eat the slimy fibrous jelly that the seeds are suspended in.

There was a spiny ball-looking fruit called a Rambutan I decided to try.  Inside the spiny skin is what looks like a peeled grape.  Inside the peeled grape is a large seed.  You eat the grape flesh - it's sweet and chewy (like octopus).  Too much work, but an interesting experience.

Went to the tour office and checked the reef situation - the weather on the reef Friday and Saturday looked promising, so we booked a reef expedition for tomorrow and went out to meet the bus that would take us to Freshwater station and our rail trip into the rain forest.
 
 

	The train trip to Kuranda was spectacular.  The locomotive was a modern diesel, but the cars were vintage.
Made a stop at Barren Falls and saw the largest spider of our lives - it was, without exaggeration, 9" from leg-tip to leg-tip.  It was suspended in it's web over a walkway - many people had walked under it without noticing it - when I stopped to get a picture, they noticed, and didn't want to walk back under it.  People are funny that way.

Had some time in Kuranda - went to the Butterfly sanctuary - saw some of the most beautiful colors - no artist can outdo these insects.
 
 

From there we went to the local bird sanctuary - similar story to the butterflies, only these were birds.  Fed a few - and Dawnise made a friend.  One liked her (food) so much it hopped onto her arm, then her shoulder to get it.

Had fresh cooked chicken satay in the market place, made by a local with a good sense of humor.

Bought me (yet another) hat - this one a foldable Barmah - the shape always associated with Australians.  Dawnise got a rollable wide brimmed white hat.

We started to try and find what our map labeled "Forest Walk" - but we never made it.  About 20m in I saw a sign that said "Bat Rehabilitation and Rescue" and we wandered over to check it out.

It was started by a lady who was finding bats who'd been tangled in barbed wire, or electrical wire, or who were orphaned, and she had decided, after moving to her current spot in Kuranda, to open her backyard to visitors and do some education as well.
 
 

Australia has four species of flying fox - so called because they look like little winged foxes - and a few species of more traditional bats.  We saw three of the four species, and an example of the smallest fruit bat in Australia - roughtly the size of a mans thumb.

Neither Dawnise nor I had been that close to a bat - and it changed our perception forever.  They are soft, cute, inquisitive, and clean animals - very much like a cat.  Unfortunately, Australia is showing the same short-sightedness with some of it's less "cute-and-cuddly" species as we did.  The bats in Australia are either fruit or insect eaters -- they do have the vampire bat, but it's fairly rare.

Fruit farmers don't like the fruit eating bats - as their natural foods are displaced or destroyed, the bats go after the fruit crops.  There's one farmer in the south who has permits to put electric netting over his fruit trees - he's killing up to 500 bats a night.  This indiscriminate slaughter results in more than the occasional orphan - who also show up at the shelter.

The upsetting part is that the bats don't particularly like eating the crop fruit - they'd much rather eat PauPau's - which are easy to grow and have little market value.  If fruit farmers would plant a small group of PauPau's at the edge of their fields, the bats would leave the crop alone.

No one takes the issue terribly seriously as there are so many bats - that sentiment reminded me of the buffalo in America.  If they don't wake up, eventually Australians will be talking about their bats in the past tense.

Leaving the bat shelter, we headed for the Sky Rail for our trip over the canopy.  The Sky Rail is a 6-7km long wire gondola system (like the Sky Buckets at Disneyland) that was built running from Kuranda over the rain forest back towards Cairns.  People with a fear of heights need not apply - the floor is solid, but the rest of the car is transparent.
 
 

Words fail to describe the rain forest - it's everything you've seen on TV, and more -- so much more.  There are two stops along the sky rail route where you can get off the gondola and walk in the rain forest along specific paths.  When you're surrounded by it, it accosts all your senses - the air smells of life - and there is no silence.

 

After reaching the bottom it was completely unimaginable how people could clear this land - knowingly driving the native species out, or to extinction.

 

As we got on the bus to head back to the resort, and civilization I realized I will never see the world quite the same again.  Reading about how much rain forest is being cleared has a whole new impact when you've been there -- seen the place, listened to the life surround you, and can imagine it being silenced by the blade of a bulldozer.

We dined at the buffet restaurant - which was no where near the quality of Jardines, but very edible, and headed to the room for a shower and to sleep.
 

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