From the Falls Station it’s another 1.7 kilometres to the Kuranda Terminal, a ten minute hop that produced sightings of crocodiles sunning themselves on the river banks last time around. I was looking forward to a repeat here, but the water stretched from side to side of the bed, and the pebbly beaches I’d seen last time looked to be under a fair depth of water.
So no basking lizards to wind up the experience, but the average visitor probably won’t be complaining.
On the ground in Kuranda we took a mosey around the tourist traps, something I wasn’t particularly looking forward to, but understood why it had to be done.
Having missed the shopping gene in the DNA and coming from a culture that doesn’t have a tradition of gift giving beyond Christmas and birthdays and such, I could probably have suggested they drop me off at the pub and collect me when they’d done the shopping bit, but discretion is the better part of valour and I trudged along without (I hope) offering too many signs of impatience or outright boredom.
Once the circuit had been completed it was a case of back to the car for the twisting and turning descent that delivered us back to Caravonica and a run into Cairns along the Captain Cook Highway.
Having hit the Esplanade there was a brief spell of semi-confusion before we pulled up at the entrance to Aquarius, where the keys to Apartment 44 were tucked away in a safe deposit box that required a security code in a check in process completely devoid of human contact.
Once we’d looped around the block twice (we missed the entrance to the car park first time around) and made our way up to the seventh floor, however, the view was close to jaw-dropping, at least as long as you avoided looking at the low tide mud flats fronting The Esplanade. Look towards the horizon, however, or confine the downward gazes to high tide, and the view, with the rainforests on Cape Grafton over on the right running right down to the water, was quite magnificent, promising plenty of visual interest around sunrise.
Aquarius, we’d noted on the way in, was also right next door to our regular Italian restaurant stop (Villa Romana), which is where we found ourselves a couple of hours later, tucking into a shared selection of Pasta Scoglio, featuring a variety of fish and shellfish and a fairly hearty meal for two, along wit one of the daily pasta specials based around crayfish (Hughesy’s selection) and a seafood risotto which The Niece had fancied that turned out to be the pick of the three dishes.
That’s a very big wrap, because Madam and I rate the Scoglio very highly indeed.
Anyway, with glasses of pinot grigio and vermentino to wash the meal down, it was a quartet of close to sated diners who wandered away from Villa Romana. Close to sated was the key descriptor here, since there were two highly rated gelato operations nearby.
Devine Gelato was ranked #1 in Cairns on the tripadvisor ratings for Cairns restaurants, and it was just across the road and down the street, but we ended up going for the Swiss franchise option at Movenpick, which was excellent, so it wasn’t as if Hughesy was complaining.
After all that and a post-prandial glass of red back upstairs Hughesy didn’t need any rocking come bed time. Predictably, neither did anyone else.