The next day we headed down to Cairns for a stay in the Pullman Reef Casino. We were welcomed by the Assistant Manager and upgraded to a junior suite as part of the Accor Le Club Platinum benefit and a welcome drink.
[photos of the pullman casino]
That night we ate at the Tamarind Restaurant, attached to the hotel. It was fantastic. I had the pork and it was the best meal I had in Australia, wonderful fusion of Asian and Australian tastes. At that point we hit the casino to waste some money.
The next day we visited Kuranda via the Sky Rail, which is a gondola that travels over the rainforest. We paid a bit extra for a glass bottomed gondola to get a full view of the trees below.
[photos from gondola]
Kuranda village is very touristy and we made the mistake of eating lunch in one of the restaurants there. To be perfectly honest, we picked the restaurant purely because it said it had air conditioning, which it only had at the entrance. I can’t even remember the name of the place to tell you to avoid it!
The evening was really interesting. I’m Welsh and a big rugby fan. I’d spent the last few days trying to figure out where I could watch the final matches in the Six Nations, which was going down to the wire. My research led m again to the casino’s sports bar which had a large screen and seating area for sporting events. Surprisingly, quite a few Welsh fans turned up to watch Wales hammer Italy but ultimately fall short. It was a good night nonetheless.
The next morning we headed back to Cairns Airport for our flight back to Sydney. Cairns was, for me, a little touristy. We had booked a tour of the reef but given the weather only the big ones were operating which wasn’t for us, so we passed. We were also told that because of the cyclone you couldn’t see anything out on the reef (because the sediment had been stirred up) and that the sea was very rough indeed, with people having to be helicoptered back to land due to extreme sea sickness.