Swinging start to high life

This is how those flight-through-forest scenes in Avatar had been filmed, our guide says as we swing in a steel cage only a few metres above rainforest and craggy ridges.
Our bird's-eye view is courtesy of the Skyrail rainforest cablecar, soaring 7.5km up to Barron Falls, near Kuranda, from a ground base just outside Cairns. Not for us the wide-windowed, closed cars which bob ahead and behind us - we glide above the McAlister Ranges national park in the "media cage".
Apart from our harnesses karabinered to a central pillar, only a steel bar holds us in the cage designed for the needs of professional photographers and film-makers. Clutching my idiot-proof, point and shoot camera, I somewhat fraudulently qualify for the thrilling ride.
Far below, a highway snakes up and around the mountains, its twisting black back the only break in the rainforest's dense grey-green cloak. Behind us green water-soaked land falls into the sea, and beyond that - surreal, like peacock feathers floating just below the surface of an opal ocean - lies the Great Barrier Reef.
After strolling forest boardwalks deep in the forest during a stop in our cablecar ride and viewing the impressive Barron Falls near the terminal, we stroll through Kuranda. A pioneer gold and timber town we'd been told was quaint and slightly groovy, Kuranda had its second coming as an alternative lifestyle centre in the 70s, and its third when the Skyrail airlifted in a tourism boom.
Apart from its dinky-die Aussie pub and the charming Kuranda Scenic Railway station, the town seems little more than a village-sized $2 shop selling trinkets probably made in the Asian countries most of the customers were from.
But the 1.45 hour train ride back down to Cairns proves as delightful as our ascent in the airborne steel basket had been. The train hugs steep hillsides, loops past waterfalls falls, sweeps across ravines and through tunnels. We had landed in tropical north Queensland the night before, escorted there by a Kylie Minogue-lookalike wearing a Nemo suit.
She and several other energetic young things sporting zinc, cozzies and snorkels were airline staff cheerleading the first Pacific Blue flight direct from Auckland to Cairns.
The three-times-weekly service could bring in 360 Kiwis a week, injecting about $14 million annually into the local economy.
This was big news in a tourism economy knocked by recession - something Queensland industry heads frankly admit despite impressions from this side of the Tasman that the Lucky Country had easy sailing through the global economic straits.
The industry detects signs Kiwi holidayers' romance with some Pacific islands is waning: Cairns and Port Douglas are ready and willing to entice more New Zealanders.
We had arrived as the rainy season - being rebranded the "green season" - set in. Hot and sticky, and with little jellyfish monstering the endless necklace of beautiful, palm-fringed beaches, this is traditionally a tourism downtime.
But after the green season comes the dream season - and that falls during the New Zealand winter.
As they say, there's something for everyone, but on the roof of the Pullman Reef Hotel Casino in Cairns, the bizarrometer just about goes off the scale.
The casino rolls along downstairs but in the two-storey high, rooftop glassed dome where showgirls used to shake their tail feathers, different plumed and furred creatures now entertain visitors in a rainforest. Yes, a rainforest planted on the casino's roof, and home to koala, birds, wallabies, reptiles and a huge bloody crocodile called Goliath.
With a stormy sunset backlighting them, flying foxes reel outside the glass dome.
Inside, Australian birds shriek and mini rainforest seethes and drips, and things scuttle in the undergrowth. Very Gothic.
The next day we make the short trip north to resort town Port Douglas.
On the way we detour to the nearby Australian Muster Experience where stockmen lean on a bar in a huge rustic shed, a guitar-plucking Phantom Stockman sings Aussie folk songs and outside a stockwoman on a nifty horse herds 30 docile cattle through torrential rain.
We tired journos can see that families and foreigners would love this stuff, with quad and horse riding, wrangling and other outback experiences on offer.
Our indefatigable group leader/driver Phil Newland, Novotel Cairns Oasis Resort's director of sales and marketing, points the van towards "Port".
He tells us little Port and city Cairns compete for - and also co-operate in - the chase for the tourism dollar.
Chic, unashamedly resort-oriented, palm and sand-fringed Port Douglas is nestled in the confluence of two world-heritage sites - the Daintree and the Great Barrier Reef - "where the forest meets the reef"'. We will get to neither on our short visit, but they are reason enough to return.
Instead, we loll around the luxurious rainforest-themed Mercure Treetops Resort where the bar and the spa are beguilingly close to each other.
Flying back into Auckland I am struck, as always after a spell in Australia, at how green one country is and how brown the other is - but this time around it is the drought-stricken north of New Zealand that is dry. Back in that verdant world of bright flowers and equally colourful trees, weird and wonderful wildlife, rivers and beaches the green season is ready to be followed by the dream season.
- Lindy Laird travelled courtesy of Pacific Blue and Accor Hotels.