Summary of Transcript:
Hi, I’m Angela Martin and welcome to Kuranda, a village that I call home. There’s not a day goes by that I’m not asked the question, Angela, what’s it like to actually live in Kuranda? So today I’m having a cup of coffee at one of my favourite coffee places and I wanted to show you by popular demand what it’s like to live in Kuranda. So today we’re actually going to have a wander around the village. Nice and easy, nice and relaxed and just show you some of the cool spots. The other thing people ask is, Angela, you live here. So I’ve been here since about 2010. Like most people, you come up to Far North Queensland for your holidays and we absolutely fell in love with it. We visited Cairns, Port Douglas, you know, all the regions. And we came up to Kuranda and it was like, oh my goodness, I just got to live here. It’s lush, it’s green. We do get rain because we are in the wet tropics and… You’ve got to love that, you’ve got to embrace it. And it’s a vibrant community. You can be as anonymous or as antisocial as you want to be. And it’s an arts community, with cafes, restaurants, beautiful weather all year round. And we have access to everything that you would ever want. It’s seriously the most, I’m biased, but it’s one of the most beautiful parts of the world. And I’m proud to call it home. And the coffee here is absolutely sensational. So we are, as I said, going to have a wander around. And if there’s any other videos that you would like to see, just call me, let me know. And if we can make it happen just to help your transition from wherever it you’re coming from to this beautiful part of the world, let me know.
Gosh, that was such a great cup of coffee, one of my favorite coffee spots. So we’re on the corner of Morong Street and Coondoo Street, which is the main street in Kuranda. And we’re just going to do orientation. So down here, you’ll actually see everybody walking up the hill. The railway station is down there. The river is down there and Sky Rail is down there. We’ve also got a police station just down there on that far corner. So we’re going to head up along the mall. I’ll go straight and I’m going to meet you at the other corner.
You can see all these gorgeous little shops. Boho Coco sells little pottery and lovely little pieces. The bath shop, handmade silks, et cetera. So very bustling, very organic, and a very, very busy thoroughfare. And that was the cafe place that we were just at. And we’re going to head up there to the next corner.
We’re still on the way up to that other corner. Kuranda is a bustling tourist village in the rainforest, and that’s why it’s so popular. So between about 10.30 when the Sky Rail or the train arrives up till about three, three-thirty in the afternoon, we always come wall to wall people. So us locals normally come out for our breakfast or a coffee or go out for dinner at night outside those hours. But I just wanted to show you how vibrant it actually is. It’s pumping.
It’s very windy today. We just had some rain. Again, that’s why we absolutely love living here. Here we go. We’ve actually got all the information that we need. So we’re on the corner of Coondoo Street and Therwine Street, Thongon Street. Therwine’s up the other end. They all begin with a TH. And if we look down this side here, we’ve actually got just where that car’s disappearing down the hill, that’s Kuranda Medical Centre. It’s a well-equipped centre. It’s open Monday to Friday. Very, very good services. And we’ve also got access to the ambulance, is along Fallon Road. So the ambulance centre is close by, and we have access to Cairns Base Hospital and Mareeba Hospital. So from a medical point of view, living in Kuranda is you’ve got access to everything you actually need. So, we just came up that way there. We’ve got what they call the Top Pub, which is a Barron Falls hotel. It’s a very busy intersection here. Over there we’ve actually got the uh Kuranda Pharmacy and then behind us, just up here, we’ve got the Arts Co-op, which is where people who are artists, they can actually show their work on a consignment basis and people volunteer and they help sell other people’s work. So we might just have a bit of a quick sneak peek in there whilst we’re here. Absolutely fantastic. We’re going to head down that way to the IGA.
A great little coffee place as well; they hand roast all their coffee. And we’re at the IGA. Local IGA, when I moved here in 2010, we had the tiniest little FoodWorks supermarket, which was really just like a convenience store. And it was up over where the chemist is now. It’s a brilliant IGA. It’s big. The prices are competitive. And you can still have access to Mareeba, which is like 20 minutes away, where they’ve got Coles. Yeah, they’ve got a big Coles there. And down the range to Smithfield Shopping Centre, which has got your Coles and your Woolies and of course all your Bunnings. But from a food perspective, the guys here at the IGA have a lot of fresh produce. You can actually just pop your head in just for 10 seconds. And then we’re going to head down that way and show you the post office.
So the post office, busy bustling post office. This building actually used to be the old library, which is now relocated down to the other side of Kuranda. But this is one of the main car parks. It’s always difficult to find car parks along each of the streets. We’re walking in a square. That’s the easiest way for us to think about it. And the post office is on Thoree Street. So we’ve got Coondoo, we’ve got Thongon, we’ve got Thoree. And then we’re heading up that way after we’ve been here to Therwine. I got it right. So the post office is, like I said, absolutely bustling. The majority of people here would have PO boxes. Let’s head up here. Heaps of PO boxes. You know, all your Christmas goodies, anything that you buy from Amazon. So, it’s a main entrance in there. And we’ve got all our PO boxes here. And all our PO boxes here. So if you are moving to the area, you wanna make sure you don’t have to, but just get a PO box because then any mail is not gonna, you it’s not gonna go amiss. And we’ll just very quickly pop a little head in here. That’s the local post office. Little post office. What more do you want? It’s bustling!
So, the Post Office, we’ve just had a look at the original markets, which we will go in, and we will have a look at in a different video. But I just wanted to mention, when you come out the Post Office, there’s actually what we call Possum Corner, which is like a little St. Vinny’s volunteer op shop, which is again, very, very vibrant and very popular. And then just to the side of that, there’s actually stairs that go up onto Coondoo Street. Nice little walk from the carpark up to the Main Street if you want to. So we’re gonna head up this corner here. Just so I can give you a sneak peek of the original market and then we’re going to walk along Therwine Street.
Great little map. We’re going to do a separate walkthrough of the markets, but again, from an orientation point of view, we have actually got another set of markets on this side of the street, have a look over here. So we’ve got a roundabout and that is the Heritage markets. The markets here go all the way round, totally vibrant. You’ve just seen one of the chefs on a skateboard before. He’s actually down at the Japanese spot. Absolutely incredible. And we’ve got the public toilets just over there. And this is, uh keep remembering my street names, Therwine Street.
And this is the heritage markets on the other side of the roundabout. Again, we’ll do a separate walk through on that. But as we walk all the way through here, that’s the corner or farm where we’ve just been, which is the original market. And then we are going to head along that main street, whoops, just there. And that’s the main public toilets.
Therwine Street is a really bustling, busy street. It’s got heaps and heaps of cafes and restaurants, cafes, corner cafes, really popular eating area. We’re going to head over and buses as well. This is where a lot of the tourists actually get dropped off. You can see the buses here and all the way down, but we’re going to head over to the park so I can point to where some of the other bits are.
These are beautiful hand-painted murals, and it just gives the vibrancy and the colour, the energy that we have in the rainforest. It really pops. This is a superduper big information centre, and there’s pretty much nothing in there that these guys don’t know. Again, they’re all volunteers, so that helps with that community spirit. And then we’ve got the park around here. Now, this is a really popular park. Brilliant for the kids. So we have… Kids’ playground. It’s like on a weekend, sometimes we have live bands. We’ve actually got an amphitheatre too, which does have lots of live bands perform, famous live bands. And we sometimes have markets here or little parades, just to get a community atmosphere. And you can see it is a big park. From an orientation point of view, I just love it here; we’ve just come along there on Therwine Street. And there is the most amazing pie shop. That you should be eating pies, but Annabelle’s has been there for years and years and years and they make homemade pies. And that’s why you when we had to look at it, it is just unbelievably busy. You could be there at 10 o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the afternoon. And so some people would be at the table eating pies. The public toilets again, we’re spoken about. We’ve actually got the neighbourhood centre just over here. Tourist attraction: Butterfly Sanctuary. And then up and over that corner, a bit of an Australian icon, a Kuranda icon, the creperie, which used to be down in the old markets. And it’s a destination. People come here every day of the week, especially a Sunday, because their food is absolutely fabulous. So that’s the creperie over there. And then over in that direction, we’ve actually got a BP, and a really great fish and chip shop. And then over here, we’ve actually got the fire station. So who says Kuranda is a little village? Roughly three and a half thousand people, I think at the last count, and about 330 meters above sea level. So we have that beautiful cool breeze. Absolutely fantastic. We’re gonna head back down Coondoo Street.
That’s the fire station that I just spoke about. And then down there is what they call the Jumrum Walk. If you actually look on the map, it takes you all the way through the most beautiful rainforest. It’s a stunning, stunning walk. And it takes you onto Barron Falls Road. So if people live, you know, not in the village, very few people live in the village, but if you live on Barron Falls Road or close by, that’s your little shortcut up into what is the heart of Kuranda.
Coondoo Street has got a lot of galleries on it. We’ve got a gallery just over here, a dress shop over there that has been there for ages, in like years and years and years, and a fantastic photography gallery, know, famous photographer, beautiful, beautiful imagery in there just as a takeaway from Kuranda or the whole of Far North Queensland region. But hopefully you can see all the fig trees, and this is magical at night, all the fig trees have got lights on them. So you come along here at dusk, that even on, you know, sometimes during the day. And it is just, it’s like fairy princess dust. It is unbelievably magical. And at Christmas, we actually have, you know, late-night trading, and all the stallholders are up and down here. And it’s just, it really is magical. You just, there’s no words to describe it. We’re gonna have a quick look at another gallery up there, and then we’re gonna head back to that corner. And we’ve got a really brilliant laundromat too. We’ve actually got two laundromats, one up next to the BP and one in here, but this is new, relatively new. Machines are in great working order, and you can get all your big fluffy doonas and whatever else you want to get in there washed and dried without any problem. And then we’ve got, again, this church has been here for a long, long time, St. Saviour’s Church. And from a reference point of view – somebody’s lost – that takes us back down to the Post Office carpark. Which is those steps just down over there that we spoke about.
There’s another big gallery, Aboriginal Art Gallery over there, absolutely some beautiful works of art, as in like really high-end, beautiful works of art. They’ve actually got a great big viewing platform up the top too, which again has works of art in it. And then you’ve got the iconic Red House. You’ll see that there’s a Thai Kai Cafe, little sign out there. They have the best Thai food and again, for such a, you know. We’re not a small village. As I said before, 3.5 thousand people in the area. The quality of the food and the quality of the coffee is absolutely fantastic. Well worth a visit.
And we’ve got some fantastic dress shops, great shopping in the whole of Kuranda and Sandra Viden. Hey Tara, how are you? Beautiful, just gorgeous, gorgeous clothes. When you get to Kuranda, just make sure you say hi to Tara. You’ll love that. It really is just a fabulous little place.
Oh, that is amazing. Muscle rub, I’ve actually used it on my back and on my legs. That stuff is just brilliant. All natural. As you would expect.
I really hope you’ve enjoyed this much needed little tour of our Kuranda village. And as I mentioned before, if there’s anything that you would like to see, just drop me a line, you know, make a comment below and I’ll see what we can do. Living here – I love it. I’m totally biased, you’ve seen my video properties, and I just am passionate about the area. It has so much to offer. It’s safe, it’s peaceful, it’s quiet. We have all this fantastic infrastructure for, you know, not a huge great big place, but we have access to everything. Know, down to Cairns, you can commute easily in the Cairns. We have the most amazing weather today. It’s cloudy, but it’s wonderful because we’re in the winter. We don’t have a lot of rain and it’s probably only about 27 degrees and it’s breezy. So we love this. You know, we get to 35 degrees in the summer when we have all that beautiful tropical rain. And that’s why things are lush. It’s green. It’s part of where we live. But all these fantastic facilities, absolutely amazing. So please leave some comments below and let’s look together to build this little Kuranda life community that you can look forward to when you move into this fantastic part of the world.