Last night the boys had fallen asleep in the car and managed to stay asleep while they were carried them up to Kosmos. In the morning, Pim looked out the windows and was shocked to see the water was gone. It was really cute. We figured it probably wasn’t a good idea to hang around breathing paint fumes all day, so we decided to head into the mountains. There are numerous national parks within a day’s driving distance, and we chose to go to the closest one, Kuranda, only a half hour away. Near the entrance of the park is a small town also called Kuranda. A visit to Kuranda town and some hikes in the Kuranda national park is a popular tourist day trip from Cairns.

The drive up the mountain was really pretty. Here is a view of Cairns and the surrounding area from the side of the road close to Kuranda.

Being that we are in a rainforest, it is green and lush here. The town of Kuranda was originally established in the mid 1800’s as a railway station when logging and mining were the big industries in the area. In the 1960’s it became an artist community, with many artists moving up there because it was near the city but had affordable housing and beautiful surroundings.

When we arrived in Kuranda, our first stop was the butterfly sanctuary, which was built and is run by the same group that has the wildlife dome. The layout is similar in that you walk through the gift shop to the entrance, then a footpath takes you in a circle around the sanctuary. Like the dome, there are tons of trees and bushes and it feels like you are in a tropical rainforest. As we walked in the door, we were greeted by several brightly colored butterflies flurrying about. We had been told a tour would be starting in five minutes, so we stayed by the entrance and waited, watching in awe the zillions of butterflies flitting about.

Like the one at the dome, the tour was informative and interesting. We found out that butterflies feed on flower nectar. Butterflies each go through several flowers a day, making it impossible for them to keep enough flowers in the sanctuary, so they came up with a solution of simulated flowers with bowls of man made nectar in them. The lid of the bowl has several holes that look like flower centers to the butterflies, and they happily go to the “flowers” to feed.

The butterflies lay tons of eggs on leaves, and have an unbelievably low birth rate in the wild. The workers go out every few hours and scrape the eggs off the leaves and take them to an incubation area. With the eggs hatching and the caterpillars growing in a protected area, the sanctuary has a significantly higher birth success rate. Once the caterpillars become butterflies, they are released back into the main sanctuary room that we were touring. They only have eight kinds of butterflies in that sanctuary because they would need too much manpower to care for any more species. They also have Hercules moths, the biggest moths in the world. Here are a few of them. As you can see, the butterflies took a liking to Eric’s hat. He had three on his head at once!

After the butterfly tour, we walked around town. It reminds us of Julian, a mountain community outside of San Diego that a lot of San Diegans take day trips to. It is a little bigger than Julian, with tropical trees instead of cooler climate trees, but like Julian, the main part of town is a few blocks of low buildings containing tons of stores selling unique handicrafts and homemade foods. It is really cute.

Our trip out with the kids gave us another feel for what it would be like to cruise with kids. Kuranda has a surprising amount of activities to do. We walked around most of town, but we didn’t see and do nearly as much in town as we would have without the kids. You move at a much slower pace with little people who don’t walk nearly as fast as you. And dealing with car seats, diapers, and all that other fun stuff takes a lot of time. Going hiking in the national park was out because we couldn’t take the stroller and the kids can’t walk that far. Even though we did less than normal, we felt more tired and worn out than usual. All our friends who are parents have told us all this time and again, but it’s one thing to be told that and another thing to experience it first hand.

After our walk around town we called it a day and headed back to the boat. They had sanded and primed the spots where the paint had chipped off and it looked like she was all ready to be painted tomorrow.