Wow! What a great day out for the family at Tropical Fruit World!! If you haven’t heard about this little beauty just over the NSW border, you need to make visiting it a priority! Founded in 1983 and formerly known as Avocadoland (hence the photo in front of the giant avocado), the farm was renamed Tropical Fruit World in recognition of the amazing variety of fruits that are now grown on the 165 acre property.
There are more than 500 fruits from all around the world growing, and regardless of the season, you will find a range of tropical fruit varieties to taste and discover. What really makes this place a great attraction though, are all the activities on offer, available by purchasing a ticket to the Farm Tour.
The Farm Tours either start or finish with a fruit tasting session, we started our tour with the tasting session, but it just depends on what time you arrive and when the next tour departs. On offer in our tasting session were about 8 different tropical fruits, some of which I’d never heard of before! Some of the more interesting options were chocolate pudding fruit, jackfruit and pomello – while all tasted delicious there were a few textures there that were very different than usual! After the tasting session, your tractor train arrives and you jump on board for a fully guided park tour.
First stop was among the banana trees, where we all got to pick and eat delicious lady finger bananas straight from the tree, crack open macadamia nuts, watch native bees coming and going from their hive and walk through a section of the orchard. The Fauna Park is your second stop, where you can feed and pat kangaroos, sheep, cows and donkeys. Located in a really shady area with plenty of space to spread out, it’s a nice stop for those little ones who might have had enough of sitting down!
From here, the transport type changes and you climb on to the wildlife boat for a short cruise around the waterways. We were accompanied by a huge flock of ducks and geese, all extremely keen to be fed – keep those fingers inside the boat!! The boat drops you off at ‘Treasure Island’, a small island that is connected to the rest of the property by bridge. You can spend as much time here as you like, with tractor train departures roughly every 20 minutes or so. If you do plan to stay longer, just let your guide know! Treasure Island is a great spot for kids to burn off some more energy and finish off the visit. Here you’ll find a playground, huge sandpit, flying fox, mini golf, volley ball net, picnic tables and a Bush Tucker presentation and sampling station. A family on our tour brought their esky with a picnic lunch and they set up to enjoy the rest of the afternoon here while the kids played.
With the tour almost finished, it’s a short tractor train ride back to the beginning where you can spend some time looking through the fruit market, gift shop and cafe. Our little one was absolutely exhausted by this point, so we called it a day, but for those with bigger kids you could easily spend so much more time here!
A ticket for Tropical Fruit World includes all activities and the tour takes about 2.5-3 hours with the ability to stay longer at Treasure Island if you wish. We made sure to get on the first tour of the day which was at 10.20am and we left at 1.15pm.
This really is such a great alternative to the traditional theme park and we enjoyed ourselves so much. We were a little concerned that being wintertime it wouldn’t be as good an experience compared to a summertime visit, but honestly, it didn’t matter at all! We are definitely looking forward to going back again in the height of summer just to try something different, but we were amazed at how many tropical fruits were still on offer given we went at the coldest time of the year.
Need to know:
Cost: Adults $48, Children $28 (0-3yrs free). Family passes available. There is also a locals offer for residents of the Tweed, Gold Coast or Byron Shires, see website for details.
Hours: 10am – 4pm, 7 days a week
Location: 29 Duranbah Road, Duranbah, NSW
Accessibility: while we did see a few prams there, they do advise on their website that prams are not permitted on the tour vehicles. We decided to use the baby carrier for this reason. You might get away with a pram in the quiet winter months, but I would come prepared to not be able to use it so you aren’t refused entry!
