Cairns, Australia

Quote: -Food Trails Tour
-Passions of Padadise
-Nightzoo

Quick Tips:

-get a hotel in the city itself

Best Way To Get Around:

Quote: Overall, the room itself was nice. We had a family style room which contained a queen sized bed and a twin bed. The bathroom was very spacious. The spare sheets, however, were a little dirty. Also, my friend was awakened almost every morning by the singing kookaburras.

The service at the resort had wasn't great. When we went to get dinner one night, we waited a good 40 minutes before our food was ready (note, I ordered a sandwich so it wasn't even hot food). The service at the resort shop also wasn't very courteous.

The resort itself was very beautiful due to the large amounts of trees surrounding the place. However, parts of it seems very dark and almost dangerous. Of the entire trip, the only time my friend and I felt unsafe was when we were wandering the resort at night. We saw a dark path with few lights and decided we didn't feel safe travelling through that path. Also, some of the pools seemed as if they needed a little more light.

Also, the two major restaurants had a policy of reservations either required or strongly recommended, which made getting dinner for us hard, since often we didn't know when we'd be returning from our day trips. The distance from the resort to the city itself was too large to walk, and the bus that travelled from the resort to the hotel stopped at 6:00, making getting dinner outside the hotel unlikely unless we wanted to pay for a taxi.

The travel agent at the resort, however, was very helpful. She was willing to make reservations for a tour for us despite the fact that we didn't have the time to pay until the day of the trip (the bus for our day trip had already arrived before we had the chance to pay).

Quote: The Food Trails Tour was without a doubt the highlight of my trip to Australia. My friend and I were lucky in that we have a ratio of two tour guides to the seven tourists. The tour guides were funny, nice, and knowledgeable and the food tasted was great. Also, going with this tour allowed us to experience areas that were normally not open to the general public. This is also the only food tour that didn’t involve self-driving we found for the Cairns/Queensland region.

The trip started out at around 8:00am when the Food Trails Tour bus picked us up from the resort (the latest starting time we had for all of our Cairns trip). After picking up the rest of the group, we first visited a farm where we learned about some native Australian fruits and some not so native Australian fruits. The tour guides gave us tips on how to choose some of the local fruit along with giving us samples of some of the fruits that were in season.

The next part of our trip took us to Granite Gorge where we stopped for morning tea. At this meal break, we had fresh baked banana bread along with tea or coffee. Also, at Granite Gorge, we had the opportunity to hand feed wild wallabies at no extra charge. Even if you’ve fed other animals already, feeding the wallabies was a new experience. My friend and I had fed kangaroos a few nights before at the Night Zoo and thought that was a great experience. Feeding the wallabies was even better. Wallabies would grab on to our hands gently so we didn’t leave with the food and eat it from our hands.

After our morning break, we headed out to Mt Uncle Distillery where we got to taste a banana liqueur, lemon liqueur, and coffee liqueur. We then went to a macadamia nut plantation where we learned how the nuts were harvested. We also had the opportunity to try and harvest our own nut. Also, we got to try some of the nuts grown on the plantation.

Next, we had lunch. Lunch on this Food Trails Tour was the best meal we had in our 10-day stay in Australia. It included red claw lobster, tropical fruit, tropical fruit juice, and barramundi. It wasn’t at any place fancy but was rather at a small café located in one of the local business areas. The meal had been specially created for the Food Trails Tour.

After lunch, we went to De Brueys’ Boutique Winery where we got to try mango, lychee, jaboticaba, and mulberry wine along with mango and mulberry port. The final stop for the tour was to Kuranda village (after all the other tourist had left) to try homemade tropical fruit ice cream.