a day ago
This has to be Australia's most breathtaking, magical landscape
The world's best fake jungle swimming pool lies in the grounds of the five-star Silky Oaks Lodge hotel in Mossman, Far North Queensland. Spangled with the sunlight that's dripped through the forest ceiling, its blue waters are fringed with river-rounded boulders and dense yet carefully pruned foliage. It's so perfect that it even fools the Torresian crows — and not much fools Torresian crows.
And yet I wonder why the owners bothered, because just 50 yards from this film set is the Mossman River: a natural waterpark in a tropical rainforest, with swimmable waterfalls, still wallows and shaded white sand beaches. It's as beautiful as a fever dream, as cool as champagne and, since the crocodiles don't come up this far, as benign as a boatload of nuns.
The Daintree Rainforest is ten million years older than the Amazon and the most ancient on the planet. It rises on Australia's Mount Carbine Tablelands, where the bull kauri conifers and red cedar trees scrape the water from the clouds as they bump across the top of the Atherton Tablelands.
There's a little-used footpath from Silky Oaks to a place called Fig Tree Rapids. The first stretch is the perfect location for those TV explorers who make hardcore survival shows — authentically wild, but just moments from the restaurant, spa and that fake jungle pool — but the deeper it goes into the forest, the trickier it gets, with trees brought down by cyclones blocking a trail that frequently vanishes, or divides into identical branches, like they do in fairytales.
I hesitate at the first bend in the path. I should be used to the forest by now — I've walked alone in jungles from the Darien to the DRC — but, deep down, I'm still scared of the woods. I think we all are.
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Some — men, mostly — cut walking sticks when they enter woodlands in a symbolic act of authority over the trees. Others talk in whispers so as not to waken what lurks within. In Finland I was told to wear my jacket inside out so as not to vanish in the metsanpeitto, or forest fog. In Papua New Guinea I was warned not to call my guide by his real name so the tree ghosts wouldn't kill him, and in the Carpathians there's a more prosaic fear: bears.
Our species came down from the trees about four million years ago. As Africa split along the Great Rift Valley, new mountain ranges changed rainfall patterns. The tropical forests in which our ancestors evolved were replaced by grasslands better suited to the new aridity, and we had to adapt.
We've now been out of the woods so long that the familiarity of home has become fear of the unknown, and as I blunder through the world's oldest rainforest, I wonder if those whose ancestors once lived here feel the same trepidation.
I can also see a situation involving a search party and the overuse of the phrase 'bloody Pom', so I waymark every junction like Hansel without Gretel, in the hope I will find my way back. If not, the old rainforest distress signal of a rock bashed repeatedly against the buttress roots of a yellow carabeen tree can be heard for miles. The vibrations are also a good way of informing snakes of your presence.
I see no snakes — Tourism Australia is very keen that I mention that — but Boyd's forest dragons (imagine an 8in T. rex) are everywhere, and the huge webs of the harmless giant orb weaver spiders are strung between the pungent dead horse trees and the light-sapping red pendas.
I watch a paradise kingfisher, with his fancy tail; electric-blue Ulysses butterflies; and I spot a sugar glider — basically a flying possum — soaring between the trees. Feral pigs, heard but not seen, flee in panic; orange-footed scrubfowl dart clucking through the undergrowth and as I round a bend I spot a golden bowerbird: a brilliant impressionist who spends his adult life building show homes to attract a mate.
This one's got a bit of the Daffy Duck about him. He doesn't spot me because he's demolishing a bower with a fury that can only be for one of two reasons. Either he's evicting a rival from his manor, or he's a bachelor frustrated by the inadequacy of his interior design skills to attract a wife. I suspect the latter. Shouldn't have gone with the Farrow & Ball, mate. That's so Y2K.
Fig Tree Rapids is the halfway point on the Mossman's sprint to the sea, the water spouting in white torrents through the gaps in a wall of giant boulders worn smooth over eons. Below the falls, it collects in still, tannin-rich pools, where rainbowfish flash in the sunlight and archerfish lurk in the shade, squirting jets of water with deadly accuracy to down reckless damselflies.
I've been told I might see the sparrow-sized giant petaltail — the biggest dragonfly in the world and a species that's been here as long as the forest — so I find a still pool in which to lie in wait. None shows, but as my blood cools the primal anxiety is replaced by wonder.
Up to my left, the Tableland is covered in a tablecloth of cloud. Billions of drops from millions of leaves trickle earthwards, irrigating 3,000 plant species — of which 920 are trees — as it percolates through soil that smells of pepper and vanilla.
It gathers in the rivulets and creeks that feed the tributaries that wind into the river like braids on a rope falling 3,440ft in a 15-mile journey to the Coral Sea, where it evaporates to form the clouds that make the tablecloth. Driven by gravity and fuelled by the sun, it's a machine so perfect that it blows my mind.
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The forest it feeds is a beautiful miracle. It nurtures and heals, repairs and recycles and, at 180 million years old, is the closest we've got to the life eternal. Every living thing in this wonderland has, in previous lives, been other things. Every second of every minute here is spent in a state of wonder, and when I report back to the hotel four hours later than expected the receptionist raises an eyebrow. Bloody Pom.
The next day I meet with the forest guides Levi Williams and Chase Walker. They're from the Kuku Yalanji community, which has lived here since long before in the woods were named after an East Anglian geologist called Daintree and the river after a gold mining politician called Mosman from New South Wales.
For the Kuku Yalanji, the forest is the Kaba Kada — or rainy place — and the river is Manjal Dimbi, named after the benign mountain spirit that keeps evil at bay from the valley. Does that mean the forest is safe?
'Let me put it this way,' Williams says. He points at a large-leafed growth not dissimilar to giant hogweed. 'Have you seen this plant before?' I have, I tell him, on my hike to Fig Tree Rapids. Can we eat it?
'No. This is the most dangerous plant in the world,' Williams says. 'We call it gympie gympie, the stinging tree or the suicide plant. It can kill a horse.'
He turns the leaf with his stick. 'See those fine hairs? They're silica-tipped. They embed themselves in the skin and deliver a neurotoxin. We had a foreigner go hiking alone here. She saw these big, soft leaves and picked a bunch to use as toilet paper. That was 15 years ago. She's still taking the painkillers.'
A flashback of me the day before, skipping between the gympie-gympies and the dead horse trees like Goldilocks, brings on a cold sweat, but Williams has moved on.
'The second most dangerous species in the forest is the cassowary,' he says. 'Australia's second largest bird: 6ft tall, with a 5in claw that can split you open. It's my spirit animal, but if I see one, I run. As for bilngkumu — or saltwater crocodile — they don't come this far upstream, but if we see one downriver, or the kurrujuwa bird warns us, and we need to cross, we splash the water to let him know we want to come in.'
Does that work? Williams shrugs. 'It has mixed results.'
Walker agrees that Far North Queensland has the odd hazard. 'But our mob has been living here for tens of thousands of years,' she says. 'The forest was our supermarket. The men would fetch the meat, the women the fruit and veg, the teenage boys the fish, and the girls would find the seeds and nuts. But the old people had the most important job. They looked after the kids, taking them on walks through the forest and teaching them what was good and bad. So we grew up with the right knowledge, and that knowledge is preserved in the community.'
So could Walker live in the woods? 'I reckon I'd be all right,' she says. 'What about you?'
I'd give myself seven days, Haslam travelled as a guest of Tourism Australia ( A 14-night luxury tour focusing on the flora and fauna of Northern Queensland, with two nights at Silky Oaks Lodge and three nights at Orpheus Island, costs from £10,995pp, including flights to Brisbane and transfers to Townsville (
