Cairns Audio Tours

Cairns is the launching point for two of the planet's most extraordinary natural environments, separated by only a few kilometres of warm Coral Sea. The Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef system stretching more than 2,300 kilometres along Queensland's coast, is reached by a short boat ride from the Cairns Esplanade, and even snorkelling from a pontoon gives access to a world of improbable colour and density. The Daintree Rainforest to the north is equally significant as one of the world's oldest continuously surviving tropical rainforests, home to species found nowhere else on earth and old enough to predate the Amazon.

The city itself has the easy, slightly sleepy character of a tropical port town that has successfully remade itself as a tourism hub without entirely losing its original character.

The Esplanade lagoon, a free public swimming pool built to compensate for the mudflat foreshore, is where locals and backpackers share the water on hot afternoons. The Kuranda Scenic Railway climbs through the rainforest-covered Barron Gorge to the village of Kuranda, an hour away but a world apart, and has been operating since 1891 when it was built to service gold fields in the hinterland. The Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park preserves and presents the culture of the indigenous Djabugay people of the Cairns region.