mutteringhousewife

Ticking off the tourist delights of Far North Queensland saw us visiting Kuranda today. You can actually drive there, but if you’re a tourist you don’t do anything so mundane. You catch the cable car up to the town, stopping at intervals to wander around some rainforesty bits on boardwalks. When you’re in the town you proceed straight to the wildlife bits. For us the first stop was the butterfly sanctuary.

Something I’ll bet you didn’t know about butterflies is that upon mating the female injects the male with a sedative as the whole thing takes fourteen hours and she doesn’t want him wandering off to watch the footy halfway through. She can actually fly away with him attached to her undercarriage if she feels threatened. You just don’t know how the other half lives until you go to these educational places. Actually it was all a bit jammed with sweaty human flesh for my liking, and the big Ulysses butterflies had an annoying habit of closing their vivid blue wings up when they stopped for long enough for you to photograph them. So we soon moved on to the bird sanctuary.

This was more like it. It wasn’t one of those politically correct setups with birds in cages surrounded by their natural habitat so you can’t see them and you can only tell what’s in there by the interpretive sign at the front. These birds were swooping around, and as soon as we got in there my husband was pounced on by a large blue macaw. It perched on his shoulder and bent over his backpack to rather rapidly remove the screw top on our water bottle. It had clearly done this before, but I don’t know what it was planning to do next, as the kids rescued the water bottle before it could produce a straw from under its wing. Thwarted, it proceeded to tear the rivets out of his hat and made a play for his sunglasses and watch before moving on its next victim. The birds were all much happier to wander up and accept food from the kids than the obese kangaroos in the koala park next door.

I was fascinated by a couple of things at lunch. One was the decorations of old stuff around the cafe, the only thing these pieces had in common was that they looked like they’d been dug out of someone’s backyard. I was particularly fascinated by the guts of a grand piano hanging like a tapestry beside us.

The other was a tarot reader. Picture to yourself an old, male hippy. That was him. Long grey hair, beard, scrawny, singlet with an Aboriginal picture of a turtle on it. Apparently tarot reading is something you need a lot of full body gestures to do well. If your kids have ever watched Stoked on ABC3, he was Kahuna.

Coming out of lunch we couldn’t help notice a rather large plane wreckage right next to the koala park.

They do seem to like random old stuff up here, the interpretive sign next to it pretty much said that’s exactly what it was.

I should also mention an alarming stall we saw at the markets. It was basically fun things you can do to a dead kangaroo. Like cut a cute kangaroo shape out of its fur. Make its paws into backscratchers. You’d know already about the scrotum purse. But you don’t have a kangaroo fur bikini, do you? I can’t believe that it’s waterproof, and I can’t think of any occasion upon which you’d wear it. And a kangaroo fur hat would be too hot, while providing no sun protection. Odd.

We took the scenic railway back, and while being fairly scenic, it certainly wasn’t the bullet train. I guess it did have to go around some fairly alarming curves. It was very ye olde and I kept expecting the witch to come around selling Bertie Botts Every Flavour beans.

I think we’ve earned a rest day. I wonder what our host would like for dinner if I cooked? I might have to do a housewife blog tomorrow.