In his latest blog post, Dale Dunlop, The Maritime Explorer, shares two differing travel experiences, Kuranda Railway & the Great Barrier Reef. If you are interested in what Adventures Abroad has to offer, please check out our Small Group Tours Down Under.
This is my seventh post from the March 2026 Adventures Abroad tour of Australia led by fellow Nova Scotian Brandi McCarthy. In the last post, we arrived in the beautiful city of Cairns and enjoyed our first Aboriginal experience at Mossman Gorge. In this post, I'm going to deviate a bit from the itinerary we followed and combine two outings we did on two separate days into this one post. The reason is simple – I don't have enough material to do a full post on the Great Barrier Reef, so I'm combining it with the Kuranda Railway. So let's put on our wetsuits and head out for some snorkelling on the world's most famous reef.
The Great Barrier Reef – Some Simple Facts
The Great Barrier Reef is the largest in the world at 2,300 km (1,430 miles) in length and 344,400 sq km in size. It is the only living structure visible from space. It consists of over 3,000 individual coral reefs dotted with 900+ islands. There are more than 450 species of hard coral and 1,000+ species of soft coral. At 1,650, there are even more species of fish. But that's nothing compared to the 4,000+ species of molluscs, including the iconic giant clam. There simply is nothing else like it on Earth, and in 1981 it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the second we will visit on this trip. Simply put, it is #1 on every snorkeler's bucket list and today our group will get to fulfill our dream of gliding over the waters of the Great Barrier Reef, looking down at the amazing fish and corals.
We will visit the reef from Cairns with Cairns Premier Reef Island Tours. This is a video from their website showing the Ocean Freedom, the boat that will take us to the reef in just over an hour.
If only the water had been as calm as the scene above, but unfortunately it was not. It was actually a bit rough, which affected visibility, but don't get me wrong, it was an amazing experience, just not as amazing as it would have been if it were calmer.
This is a view of Cairns from the water as we headed for the reef.
Despite being off the coast of northern Queensland, you still need a wetsuit to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef. Here's some of our group ready to go.
The reason I don't have enough material for a single post is that I have no photos of the many species of fish and coral we saw. We also got to see the giant clams, a first for Alison and me. Here is a short gallery of our time above water and you'll see a lot of happy faces.
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It was just a wonderful day.
Kuranda Railway
The Kuranda Railway starts in Cairns and rises 328 metres (1,076 feet) to the Kuranda station 37 km (23 miles) away, passing over 55 bridges and 15 tunnels along the way. It was built in 1891 to provide an easier means of access to the Atherton Tablelands, where there were gold and tin mines. It has been a tourist train since 1936.
Our journey does not start in Cairns, but rather at Freshwater Station, which is a suburb at the edge of the rainforest. As you can see from the map, it passes several waterfalls along the way and follows the course of the Barron River, which is part of Barron Gorge National Park.
Freshwater Station is quite historic in its own right, featuring these stained-glass kookaburras.
The engine is painted with the image of Buda-dji, a snake that in Dreamtime carved out the Barron River Gorge.
OK, all aboard.
The Kuranda Train is long enough that I can get views of the engines on several of the horseshoe bends.
After a pretty steady climb, we reach our first waterfall on the Kuranda Railway. This is Stoney Creek Falls.
We do make a stop to get a good view of Barron Falls, which are pretty impressive. Any ideas of Australia being a 'dry' continent are dispelled by the fact that it is raining in the Wet Tropics of Queensland, which is our second UNESCO World Heritage Site in this post. We'll explore it further in the next post.
This is a view of both the falls and the Kuranda Railway.
Shortly after passing the falls, we see the Barron River dam, which, unlike the infamous Churchill Falls dam in Labrador, has not totally destroyed the falls to generate electricity.
Our journey ends at the Kuranda Railway station, but not our time in the rainforest. In the next post, we'll learn how to throw a boomerang, walk through the world's oldest forest and take the Skytrain back to Cairns. I hope you'll join us.
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