Yellow Fish cruises: Day 33: Yorkey’s Knob

Our stellar weather continues, and I’m thrilled about that. This is the only time we do this itinerary this season, so it’s especially nice that we’re doing it during a good weather window. I wondered about why this itinerary is only offered one time, but I think I might know at least part of the reason. These tender ports are hard. These are long tender transfers. Today we spent nearly 90 minutes in each direction just getting between the ship and the port, adding nearly three hours to an already fully scheduled today. Maybe once is enough for this itinerary.

When we were here two years ago, Yorkey’s Knob was the port where we had reserved a small plane trip over the Great Barrier Reef. That was an amazing experience, but it precluded us doing our second choice for an excursion....the world famous Kuranda Railway. G loves historic train rides, and the Kuranda Railway was initially built in the late 1800s to move supplies to and from the coast. The train has run continuously (continually?) since then, for the last several decades as a tourist attraction. In July, we booked the Princess excursion to take the Skyrail Rainforest Tram up to Kuranda, and the Kuranda train on the return.

After breakfast in the DaVinci Dining Room, we met Paul and Marlene in the Wheelhouse Bar, where we were assigned to a tour group. On both of our water transfers today, we were on a large shoreside shuttle boat that holds several hundred passengers. While they accommodate a lot of people, they take significantly more time to load and unload. I guess I like to see shoreside shuttles in use...but then want to personally be on a ship’s tender that holds about 150 passengers.

We boarded a coach for a 10 minute ride to the base of the Skyrail Rainforest Tram (like a ski gondola), then boarded a 6 passenger tram at the Smithfield Terminal. The views began almost immediately as we climbed above the World Heritage listed Wet Tropical Rainforest. First we had endless views of the Coral Sea, then our view became a million shades of green as we looked straight down on the rainforest.

Link to the Skyrail Rainforest Tram website

The Ruby Princess at anchor

The Wet Tropics Rainforest

We descended below the canopy of the rainforest to our first stop at Red Peak. Here, signboards and a ranger-guided walk along a raised boardwalk allowed us to get up close to the rainforest.

A Strangler Fig growing down a host tree

Trees compete with each other for sunlight using symbiotic relationships with other trees.

Boardwalks provide easy access to the rainforest floor

We reboarded another tram to continue up the mountain. Our next stop was at Barron Falls, in Barron Gorge National Park. There were two overlooks offering expansive views of Barron Gorge and the multiple drops of Barron Falls.

The longest expanse of the Skyrail tram

Barron Falls

Barron Gorge

The Skyrail Rainforest Tram ends at Kuranda, and we took a short shuttle ride into the town. We had just enough time to grab a quick lunch at an outdoor cafe before we returned to the Kuranda Railway Station. Here we received our tickets for the ride back down the mountain to the coast.

Kuranda Railway Car

Link to the Kuranda Scenic Railway brochure

The ceiling of the rail cars was pressed metal

We had a photo stop at Barron Falls on the way down

Our first view of the Coral Sea

Sydney Creek Falls

The Ruby Princess at anchor

We disembarked the train at Freshwater Station and found our bus among the many waiting for passengers at the station. It was about a 20 minute ride back to Yorkey’s Knob and the tender pier. When we arrived at 4pm, the tender line was quite long, requiring about 40 minutes of standing in line. We finally boarded the large shoreside shuttle for our return to the Ruby Princess at 4:40pm. We were on board about 5:20pm, and I went directly to the DaVinci Dining Room to tell headwaiter Mehai that we would make it to dinner; we just needed speedy showers before we went. Our delay was no issue tonight; there were hundreds of passengers still on shore, and the dining room was quite empty when we finally got there about 5:45pm. We ate just two courses plus dessert and went to the 7:30pm Rod Stewart Tribute Act by Dave Patten. He sounded just like Rod Stewart and was quite good..

Day 5 dinner menu, page 1

Day 5 dinner menu, page 2

Day 5 dessert menu

We were nearly asleep by the end of the show. Over dinner, we seriously scaled back our plans for tomorrow in Port Douglas. It’s another long tender ride to shore, so four hours or so ashore should be plenty for us. I think some time on the Terrace Deck looking at the beautiful water of this Great Barrier Reef area sounds like a fine idea, too.