28 October 2006

I had too much to write this time, plus we can only get four photos in per blog article, so here’s what we did one day we were in Cairns.

We decided to get a rental car for the day. I was keen to see and learn a bit of the Aboriginal culture, and Shane wanted to check out the crocodiles. Of course, we picked the rainiest day that we were in Cairns.

First up was Tjapukai, (pronounced Jab-u-Kai, and they say Maori is hard!) Aboriginal Cultural Park, which is in the Barron Gorge about 20 minutes north of Cairns. The Barron Gorge area is the traditional home of the Tjapukai people. A bit like NZ with it’s different Maori tribes being associated with specific areas, the many aboriginal tribes are much the same.


The park has five theatres where we learnt the history of the people, there were song and dance performances, boomerang and spear throwing demos, and didgeridoo playing. Shane was very disappointed as due to the rain, the boomerang throwing was cancelled.

Shane thought the park was average, but I found parts of it great, particularly the skills involved with playing the didgeridoo.


Next up we were off to Cairns Tropical Zoo just up the road.

Not long after we got there, it was “have your photo taken with a koala time”. So here we are, Shane and I, with Tilly the koala.




Isn’t she cute??!! Koalas sleep for 18-20 hours per day (I think I want to come back as a koala in my next life!!). Koalas are amazing in how they manage to stay sleeping in the branches of a tree, without falling out. They have very strong front paws, but their body and back paws are very weak. They also have very poor eyesight and rely on their strong sense of smell to work out if the eucalyptus leaves that they are near are the right ones to eat. There are many varieties of eucalyptus leaf, and only a few are on a koala’s diet. The zoo had recently had a few mother koalas give birth; the little baby koalas were really really cute…..

Part of the reason Shane was keen to go to the zoo was to see a crocodile or two. We thought it best to see them at the zoo first, rather than our initiation to them being a visit on or near ‘enzwell’. Well, we saw a few crocs at the zoo all right……



As well as the ones in the photo, there were some extra huge crocs in another enclosure. The scary part is that when they are under water, you are lucky if you can see their eyes and bridge of their nose, so you have absolutely no idea of the size of them. I did learn though that crocs are relatively slow over land – compared with their speed through the water – so I better start work on my 100 metre sprints.


And of course, what would a visit to an Aussie zoo be without a snake or three. The zookeeper brought out a few pillowcases at the start of his demo, and when they started wriggling it wasn’t too hard to figure out what was inside. Most of them he touched, but with this little sucker he used a pole with a hook at the end.









One bite from this baby and it would be all over within five minutes. I made a mental note to pay a bit more attention to things at ground level the next time I’m walking near any long grass…

After the zoo, we drove on up to Port Douglas, as Shane hadn’t been there before. We had the obligatory wander around the shops, dinner at the pub, before we headed back to Cairns after a pretty full-on day.

S and H