Walking across the tarmac at Melbourne Airport on a blustery winter morning, it seems unfathomable that in a few hours I’ll be tearing off my coat and kicking back with a mojito.
The direct flight delivers me almost to the door of the Novotel Palm Cove in time for lunch, and I find that a tropical cocktail is the only fitting way to adapt to the climate.
While I could happily chase my mojito down with another one and relax by the pool, my companions and I opt to visit Cairns Tropical Zoo, where I temporarily morph into Bindi Irwin. I’m unfazed by the prospect of touching a python. Feeling its soft, shiny scales, I finally understand the lure of a python skin handbag, though I keep that to myself and concede that the live version is quite impressive, too.
Python patting is one of the many interactive activities at the zoo. I’m also asked to put on my brave face while restraining a baby crocodile and feeding lemurs in their enclosure. But the highlight is undoubtedly holding a beautiful, docile koala.
From wildlife to Dreamtime, we head to Daintree National Park to preview the new Mossman Gorge Centre, an Indigenous ecotourism development that opens this week. Our guide, Roy, leads us into the depths of the rainforest on a Dreamtime walk and explains that this 50,000-year-old path is the very same “backyard” that he and his family, the Kuku Yalanji people, have grown up in. He invites us to take a dip in a secluded waterhole.
As a general rule I don’t drink before noon, but the following day, as we set off on another expedition, I’m offered a glass of champagne at exactly 9.08am as I sink into my gold class seat on the Kuranda Scenic Railway. It seems rather decadent, but as we chug out of the station, I declare that I’m holidaying and it’d be rude not to.
This is the only way to journey past raging waterfalls and the Barron Gorge up to Kuranda, a quaint little village plucked out of the 1880s and placed at the top of the verdant canopies.
I step out of the train and explore the town, admiring colourful wings at the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary, believed to be the country’s largest butterfly exhibition. Later, I’m challenged to try ‘‘Barry’s rough-as-guts red’’ at the Kuranda Pub. The label warns that it’s “best drunk with teeth clenched” but that certainly doesn’t deter this seasoned quaffer.
Next we’re scheduled to take on the whitewater rapids, so we wash down our glass of red with some water and float above the rainforest on the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway. As we disembark, we meet our fearless, dreadlocked whitewater rapids instructor, Leon “Wicked” Parkhill, who ferries us to what I pray will not be spectacular carnage.
As we take to the water, his wide-eyed enthusiasm for his ‘‘office’’, the Barron River, does little to dispel my nerves and I squeal uncontrollably through what I’m assured are quite moderately sized rapids. Overcoming infamous rapids including the “Mother-in-law” and the “Toaster”, I’m pleased to find I can swim away unscathed and float triumphantly around Lake Placid at the end of the ride.
I don’t truly relax until I climb into the spa in my suite at the Pullman Reef Hotel Casino in Cairns, but after a short period of immersion I get fidgety. I’m determined to get in a few hands of blackjack before dinner. My gambler’s itch was telling. After 30 minutes of chatting to a local fisherman over a few hands at the casino, I head to dinner with my companions significantly up on what I started with.
The luck continues as we’re chauffeured back to the airport in the hotel’s Audi convertibles.
I hope the sunny disposition I leave Cairns with is powerful enough to override Melbourne’s winter gloom.
Nicole Haddow travelled courtesy of Accor Hotels and Tiger Airways.
