Daintree Rainforest is yet another UNESCO World Heritage Site. (Seems like Australia is full of them.)

There’s no question this place should receive such recognition. The largest rainforest in Australia, it contains a huge fraction of the country’s plant and animal species. It is the oldest in the world—135 million years—and for this reason contains living markers of the evolutionary history of life on earth.

It almost didn’t happen. UNESCO recognition was fiercely opposed by the local council and by the Queensland government as antithetical to economic development.

The road from the Daintree ferry continues through the rainforest for another 25 miles before ending at Cape Tribulation, the place where Captain Cook beached his ship after colliding with the Great Barrier Reef. (He thus became the first person in history to damage the reef’s coral.)

For most of its length, the road snakes through thick jungle.

The Alexandra Range Lookout Point offers a rare vista: this one of Cape Kimberley and the mouth of the Daintree River. Almost everywhere else, thick forest obscures the horizon.

Riotous growth confirms every fantasy I’ve ever had of what a jungle is like. These are the “wet tropics.” Annual rainfall is just over 2000 mm (around 80 inches), typically falling in short torrential downpours. There have been occasions where a foot of rain has fallen in an hour.

Competition for sunlight and nutrients is intense. Look at how plants grow on other plants: vines crawl up tree trunks, epiphyte fur covers limbs.

The jungle ends abruptly at the sea where mangroves provide nurseries for marine life. Nowhere else do coral reefs adjoin rainforest.

Our lodgings are in a cabin deep in the Daintree Rainforest. Oddly, the place where we’re staying calls itself a resort—I guess becuase it has a restaurant, a swimming pool and a spa. But while we were there no one used the spa. People don’t come here to be pampered: they come to experience the world as it was a hundred million years ago.

Inside our rattan-furnished cabin, extensive screened windows allow us to live within the jungle while protecting us from a plethora of poisonous insects, spiders and snakes.

A short walk from our cabin, we come to a beach where we can walk without clawing through undergrowth. We’re almost within wading distance of the Great Barrier Reef. In the early morning, we have this patch of the Coral Sea to ourselves.

I imagine there are only a handful of places in the world where you can live in a rainforest. I suspect that many of these involve going upriver in a dugout canoe while avoiding anacondas and headhunters. I’m not sure Daintree Rainforest is particularly safe, but I bet it’s a lot safer than, say, the Orinoco River.

We’re in a jungle in a first world country that is culturally much like the USA. No squat toilets, no language barrier. Here we can drink the water. Our cabin contains a shower, a refrigerator and a stove. We can walk two hundred yards and order cappuccinos.

Yet we are in one of the oldest, wildest places on earth. We’re told Daintree doesn’t look much different than it has for millions of years before humans appeared. No place is more primeval.