Four days in Cairns: no beach in town, and the best day out in Australia

Arrival day here has one job, which is to get you organised for a boat that leaves before eight tomorrow. Book the reef trip today if you have not already, and check the wind forecast while you do it.

Then walk the Esplanade. It runs a couple of kilometres along the waterfront with a boardwalk over the mudflats, and at low tide it is one of the better places in Australia to watch wading birds, which is not what most people fly to Cairns for and is a genuine pleasure anyway. Halfway along is the lagoon: a free, filtered saltwater pool the size of a football pitch, with lifeguards, sand around the edge and a barbecue area. This is the town's beach and it works.

The museum is a five minute walk inland in the old School of Arts building, and it is small, well done and worth an hour. It covers the Yidinji people whose country this is, the gold and sugar that built the port, and the extraordinary period when Cairns was a staging point for the war in the Pacific.

Eat early, sleep early. The alarm is unkind.

This is the day. The outer Great Barrier Reef sits about fifty kilometres offshore here, and a fast catamaran gets there in ninety minutes.

The best of the day boats do two stops. The first is Michaelmas Cay, a low crescent of white sand in open water that is one of the most important seabird nesting sites on the entire reef, with more than twenty thousand birds on it. Only a handful of operators hold a permit to land passengers on the beach, and the water around it is shallow, warm and full of fish, which makes it the easiest snorkelling of the trip. Stay inside the roped area on the sand: the birds are nesting a few metres away and they are the reason the permit exists.

The second stop is a mooring on the outer reef itself, where the hard coral gardens are, in deeper and clearer water. This is the one that looks like the documentaries.

You do not need to dive. Snorkelling on the surface over a coral bommie shows you most of it, and every boat carries a glass bottomed tender for people who would rather stay dry. If you have never dived, an introductory dive with an instructor is available on the day and does not need a certificate.

You will be back at the pier around half past four, sunburnt and salty and no use to anybody. Plan nothing for the evening.

The wall of green behind Cairns is the Macalister Range, and there are two ways up it. The right answer is to take one up and the other down.

The railway was hacked out of the Barron Gorge in the 1880s to supply tin miners on the tableland and opened in 1891. Fifteen tunnels, ninety three curves, cuttings blasted by hand off ledges above the river, and a great many men died building it. The train climbs slowly for an hour and a half, stops at a viewpoint over the Barron Falls, and finishes at a station in Kuranda that is buried under hanging baskets.

Kuranda itself is a rainforest village that has been in the tourism business a long time and does not hide it: markets, cafes, and three small wildlife attractions within walking distance of the platform. The butterfly sanctuary is the pick of them, an aviary of rainforest species including the Ulysses, which is electric blue and roughly the size of a hand. Wear something bright and they land on you.

Five minutes out of the village is a larger park where amphibious army trucks left over from the war take passengers through the trees and straight down into a lake, and where the Pamagirri people run dance performances and teach spear and boomerang throwing.

Come down on the cableway. It runs seven and a half kilometres over the top of the canopy with two stops on the way, and looking straight down into an intact rainforest from a gondola is an entirely different thing from walking through it.

Four kilometres out along the northern road are the botanic gardens, which are free, tropical and much better than a last morning deserves. They were laid out in 1886 and hold one of the most complete collections of tropical plants in Australia, across five separate zones, including an orchid conservatory and a fern collection.

The two boardwalks are the reason to come. One runs through remnant lowland rainforest, which is the vegetation that covered this whole coastal plain before the sugar cane; the other goes out over the mangroves on the far side of the road, which is where you understand why nobody swims here. Both are flat, shaded, and take under an hour together.

Then it is fifteen minutes to the airport, which is on the same side of town.