Left Port Douglas this morning. It is a great town and we recommend it over Cairns as a base to explore the tropical Queensland area. Our day mainly involved a visit to Kuranda. However, the real focus was the historic Kuranda Scenic Rail train from a base near Cairns to Kuranda high in the hills and return on the Skyrail Cable Car. Great experience and scenery on both. The train was over 1 1/2 hours and the cable car 45 minutes. Both were well worth the co...

Today was our day on the Great Barrier Reef with Quicksilver Tours. We took a high speed catamaran on a 90 minute cruise to the platform the company has moored on the Reef. Most of the passengers snorkeled, some dived. We took a semi-submersible craft that had all passengers seated 5 feet below the surface with glass windows on the sides. The coral shapes and size are interesting and impressive, but not as colourful as we had expected based on the pictures in...

We arrived in Cairns yesterday, picked up our car (a Hyundai Accent) and drove to Port Douglas. Not too much of a challenge driving on the "wrong" side of the road, but the traffic is not very heavy. Today we drove to Cape Tribulation, crossing the Daintree River by ferry and visited the Daintree Discovery Centre. The aerial walkway, tower over the canopy and audio tour were well done giving us a good view and commentary on the Queensland rain forest, which is...

Disembarked the cruise ship today. After dropping our luggage at the hotel, we headed for the Taronga Zoo where we spent the day. Great setting for the zoo -- across the bay from and overlooking Sydney from the top of a hill. It is a really good zoo that dates back to 1916. It is well laid out and has a good, diverse collection. We place it at least on a par with the San Diego Zoo. Tomorrow we are off to Cairns to begin our road trek.

We are in Burnie on the north coast of Tasmania today. It is raining - the first inclement weather day we have had in the 5 weeks we have beenin Australia. Burnie is a relatively small place. At one point it was an industrial town (forest & pulp). It appears to be a transhipment port for wood chips now. There is nothing much in town and it seems the cruise line stops here to allow it to arrange tours of the Tasmania countryside. Had we not planned to co...