I could not believe I had never heard of the Daintree until I was standing in the middle of it. The oldest rainforest on the planet, and it had never once come up. Not in a documentary, not in a list of things to do in Australia, not in any conversation I have ever had about Cairns.
It felt like one of the wonders of the world. All that lush green should be getting the same recognition as the Great Barrier Reef, without any trouble. And personally, the Daintree is one of the best things I have experienced in Australia, right up there with Uluru.
Where is the Daintree
The Daintree is in Far North Queensland, roughly 2 hours north of Cairns and 45 minutes from Port Douglas. It covers around 1,200 square kilometres, making it the largest tropical rainforest in Australia, and is estimated to be more than 180 million years old. That is about 125 million years older than the Amazon. Older than the dinosaurs.
It is part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area and the only place on Earth where two World Heritage sites meet. The rainforest runs straight into the Great Barrier Reef. The Eastern Kuku Yalanji people are the Traditional Owners and have lived here for more than 50,000 years.
Inside the Daintree
Everything here has a use. Food, water, shelter, medicine, rope. Our guide kept stopping at things that looked like ordinary leaves and explaining what you could eat, drink, wrap or sleep under.
It is not a park you stand and look at. It is a pantry, a pharmacy and a hardware store. A home and a town, all at once.
The animals
The Daintree has the full Australian roll call: crocodiles, crabs, snails, cassowaries. We saw a cassowary.
It also has ants you can eat. Green ants, which our guide offered up mid-walk. Me being me, I wanted to try. The guy in front of me got there first and licked the ant straight off the leaf, and that was the end of my curiosity. No chance I was going in after that.
He said it tasted like sorbet.
Hmmmm. Nature sorbet.
The Daintree flora
Two plants to know about. The first is the wait-a-while, a climbing palm covered in hooked spines that catch your clothes and leave you standing there untangling yourself, which is exactly how it got the name.
The second is the stinging tree. Fine silica-tipped hairs that break off in your skin, a sting people describe as never forgotten, and pain that can come back weeks or even months later.
After that briefing, I walked a lot more carefully around the Daintree. More worried about a plant than a crocodile, which I did not see coming.
The bush food
We stopped at the Daintree Ice Cream Company, where the flavours change daily depending on what is ripe in their own orchard. You do not get to choose. You get a cup of four, all made from fruit grown on site: black sapote, soursop, wattleseed, coconut, Davidson plum, jackfruit, whatever is in season.
I also picked up a chilli rub, which I am very keen to try at home.
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[…] Aboriginal Smoking Ceremony on a rainy day as I entered Mossman Gorge at the southern end of Daintree National Park in […]