20 Feburary, 2012

Butterflies are pretty, and one of the attractions in Kuranda we hadn't visited when we arrived was the butterfly house. We had the whole day, as Keff was back to work, and our sky rail wasn't until the afternoon, so butterflies sounded like a perfect morning.

It was spectacular. Thousands of butterflies, all the big beautiful tropical ones, the Cairns Birdwing and the Ulysses, and everything in between. They land on your hair, they flitter around your legs, you do your best not to step on them. The house also has a large nursery where they raise caterpillers for all the butterflies, so although we didn't see any more hercules moths, we got to see the caterpillers! Absolutely enormous, like green prickly sausages. No wonder the moth itself is so big!

We stopped at all the stations coming down on the skyrail, looking at the very dry Barron Falls from the other side, and strolling through more rainforest, before getting back to ground level to wait for our shuttle back to the hostel.

While we were waiting, we made a new friend, a very large stick insect! Though, given it's shape and colour, leaf insect is probably a better name. He didn't seem particularly well, though perhaps that was because he'd ended up down on the grass, instead of where ever his home should have been?