Many people outside Australia get Cape Tribulation and the Daintree rainforest confused, and use them interchangeably to refer to the same place - probably because tourists heading for the Daintree often stay at the Cape. In fact, Cape Trib (as it tends to be known) is actually a relatively small township on a headland within the much greater Daintree rainforest. Although there are other places to stay, the Cape is probably the most popular destination in the rainforest simply because it is where most of the backpacker hostels and eco-resorts can be found. Despite this, the area still manages to hold on to its "middle of nowhere" feel and provides only the most basic of facilities - a couple of small shops, a cafe, and not much else. If you intend to visit Cape Tribulation looking for much more than somewhere to eat and sleep, a beach and a shop not much bigger than the boot of your car, you really are going to the wrong place. However, a more relaxed township you couldn't hope to find - I think I counted about three roads throughout our stay, one of which was the main road and even that was surrounded by rainforest on both sides and only about wide enough to get a car down. It's as though somebody has just dropped a couple of roads as unobtrusively as possible into the forest just so that people can get in and out, and then tucked all the buildings out of site - driving through, you might even blink and miss everything. Rest assured that the area was only named Cape Tribulation by James Cook in 1770 after his ship ran aground and his explorations took a decisive turn for the worse; no such troubles greet the modern visitor. Access to the headland is via a car ferry which crosses the Daintree river to the south, and a sealed road into the township.

The Coconut Beach resort has a sister hotel in the town, so they were more than happy to lay on a small van to shuttle us between the two whenever we wanted. This meant that we could just wander down to reception at any time and ask for a lift into town, and they would drive us across Thompson Creek over a wholly inadequate bridge and drop us off opposite the Ferntree Lodge at the entrance to what appeared to be something of a local attraction - the Dragonfly Gallery Cafe. This had to be one of the most welcoming places I've come across in all my travels - it seems as though the Dragonfly serves as everything from a local meeting place to a classy restaurant, a small cafe or a makeshift nightclub, depending on the day of the week and the mood the owner is feeling in at the time. A couple of hundred yards away down the road from the Cafe is PK's Jungle Village, a large backpacker resort, so the Dragonfly seemed to be a favourite hangout for people staying there, although we saw a good cross-section of people pass through as it was also convenient for the more upmarket Ferntree resort across the road.

The Dragonfly was a real Aussie experience to us, and summed up much of what makes Australia such a great place to visit. From the road, a short pathway meanders through the forest until you come to the entrance to the cafe, a large eco-friendly building very much in the Australian tradition, constructed entirely out of native timber and surrounded by a covered verandah. The verandah is one of the widest I've come across, so much so that around the back it feels as though you're sitting in a room with only one wall. Naturally, the whole place is topped off with a sturdy tin roof. Inside, chairs are scattered around tables with just the right degree of wobbliness, shutters over the glassless windows are held open by strings and ceiling fans turn at full speed to counteract the heat outside. Visitors are generally either sitting around playing any of the numerous board games the cafe has to offer (Eloise and I spent many an hour staring intently at a scrabble board), lazing on the verandah with a cold beer or a book, or even emailing home - the Dragonfly also doubles as the local internet cafe. Not satisfied with already being surrounded by dense rainforest, the owners of the Dragonfly have gone just that little bit further and filled every available gap in the foliage around the building with tropical flowers, pools of fish, extensive lily ponds and even a fairly large waterfall around the back. I still can't believe they have a waterfall, however much I repeat it. Oh, and just in case all this isn't enough, you might have sort of gathered from the clue in the name "Dragonfly Gallery Cafe" that this is also where you can come to peruse the works of local artists, something well worth doing in itself as Aboriginal art can really blow your mind. I could easily describe the Dragonfly Cafe as perfect and still be doing it an injustice - where else could you sit in the rainforest being splashed by droplets from a cascading waterfall and have somebody bring you cold drinks while you're doing it? In my humble opinion, anyone who goes to Cape Tribulation and doesn't visit this place at least once clearly needs a firm kick up the backside. Gee, I really hope my cheque is in the mail! Since our visit, it seems as though the Dragonfly has now also become home to an alternative treatment centre called Leilani Studios, offering massages and hot stone therapy, whatever that is. If the place gets any more new age or relaxed they'll be requiring long hair and save the planet tee-shirts just to get through the door.

When we arrived in town on our first night, the Dragonfly was in full swing - there seemed to be some sort of party going on inside. The place was packed - people had obviously turned up from all around and were either making use of a makeshift dance floor inside, passing around a list of songs available on the Karaoke machine or sitting around casually on the verandah drinking cappuccinos and reading their books as though nothing unusual was happening. A notice advertising the event, obviously printed on the cafe's own computer, was tacked casually to the door - but somehow I got the impression that this was a pretty well known local event anyway. Martin, the owner, seems to be something of a local character and a self proclaimed master of everything - besides keeping the cafe, restaurant and gallery running smoothly, he juggles all this with running the local shuttle service, taking visitors on jungle treks and local tours, arranging parties on the beach and being master of ceremonies for all sorts of local events. According to the amount of praise I found for him and his cafe while researching this book, Cape Tribulation would virtually fall apart without him!

Martin certainly looked after us and kept us informed when, on our second day in the rainforest, our afternoon visit to the Dragonfly for a snack and a game of scrabble was interrupted by what amounted to a small ocean being tipped out of the sky onto the Daintree. They don't call it a rainforest for nothing, that's for sure. When we arrived in town it was already pouring with rain, but we didn't think too much about it - we're British after all, we're more than used to a spot of rain. We went inside, had a meal and spent a contented couple of hours chatting and playing scrabble, noticing that it was still pouring down outside but not really feeling too worried. Then we said Goodbye, went outside and waited at the end of the drive for the shuttle to turn up. After ten minutes, our clothes were so waterlogged that it felt as though we had been swimming in them, so we went back inside and asked Martin if he could call the resort and make sure the shuttle was coming. This was when we discovered that Thompson Creek had overflowed and flooded the bridge, and that we actually had slightly less than no chance at all of getting back to the Coconut Beach resort without swimming - not an option to be taken lightly, as the creek is home to the friendly neighbourhood crocodiles. Apparently this sort of thing happens regularly at this time of year, as the quite admirable wish by the government to do as little damage to the ecosystem as possible means that nobody wants to build a bridge over the creek which can in any way cope with more than a couple of bucketfuls of water being dropped on it. It is not, therefore, at all unusual to pop over to the Dragonfly for lunch and find yourself stranded there until late evening or, if you're really unlucky, the next day. Perhaps this is part of the reason why Martin ensures that his place is so inviting - at no point did we feel even slightly put out by the fact that we had to stay at the Dragonfly for a few extra hours. We just played some more scrabble, at which Eloise was starting to develop the interesting habit of beating me every time, had some drinks, and bided our time. Martin kept us informed, regularly coming over to tell us that the creek was still flooded but we were more than welcome to order more drinks. Eventually, the creek did go down enough for the shuttle to come and collect us, but even then it was touch and go and we drove across the bridge as carefully as possible through what seemed like a couple of feet of water. I should point out here that the roads north of Cape Tribulation aren't actually sealed, which means that they are basically just dirt tracks accessible only to four wheel drive vehicles. One of these days I'd love to venture further north, perhaps even to Cooktown at the northernmost tip of Queensland, but you really do have to wonder what the people up there do when the really heavy rains come - they must get trapped for weeks at a time.

Another place we ate in town was at PK's Jungle village, the nearby backpacker resort. As we had come to expect from youth hostels across the continent, the atmosphere was friendly and welcoming, and they were more than happy to let us use their large dining hall even though we weren't actually staying on site. The experience was certainly different. We had to announce ourselves at reception, have cutlery allocated to us, line up to collect and pay for our food and then return our plates, knives and forks to the kitchen for washing up afterwards. Those who aren't used to the whole backpacking lifestyle and whose idea of a restaurant involves waiters taking your order and then cleaning up whatever mess you've made after you leave might find this approach to eating out to be a curious mixture of school dinners and the canteen in television prison dramas. The main difference would be, of course, that you don't usually get a gun pointed at you by the warden if you don't eat up all your greens. I went to a tough school.

PK's (I wonder who PK is?) was totally different from my previous experience of budget accommodation in the rainforest, when I had stayed at the Crocodylus over at Cow Bay. On that occasion I had bedded down in what amounted to an oversized tent, and spent the days living and eating in a combined kitchen cum living space within a large wooden hut with open sides nearby. Not that I would want to suggest for one moment that there's anything wrong with sleeping in a tent and casting aside the home comforts for a few days - far from it - but PK's Jungle village certainly looked to be an entirely different experience to my time at the Crocodylus. PK's is clearly aimed at people who want to live in the rainforest but can't quite cope without the comforts of home - so, just for starters, the large dining area comes complete with a licensed bar, three meals are laid on every day and there's a large swimming pool where you can swim among the trees. To be honest, just the fact that they had a proper reception area which took credit cards and arranged tours made the resort a world apart from the Crocodylus, where I had been told that the owners were living some distance away and we were pretty much on our own.

A number of optional excursions were available from reception at the Coconut Beach resort, but unfortunately booking all the good ones would've hit our budget quite hard so we settled on the nocturnal walk as the best of the bunch. This particular tour was also available from the Dragonfly cafe, so we may well have paid over the odds to book it through reception, but we didn't really mind as it turned out to be one of our best memories of the rainforest. I have a particularly wonderful photo of Eloise, clearly taken when she wasn't expecting to be caught on camera, staring bewilderingly and wide-eyed into the lens in her own personal recreation of a scene from the Blair Witch Project. Needless to say, this photo won't be turning up in this book as I don't wish to receive a smack in the mouth.

There's something ever so slightly strange about the concept of going for a walk in the deepest, darkest rainforest after nightfall. Having learned that it's not even sufficient to worry about all the critters hidden in the undergrowth because even the vegetation has a nasty habit of putting you in hospital for months, the idea of going for a walk through the same undergrowth late at night with only a small torch to help distinguish friend from foe might sound just a little foolish. Nevertheless, we were in good hands and were relieved to hear that our guide had previously taken hundreds of tour groups on the same trip and that not one single person had ever vanished mysteriously into the night only to suddenly stumble out of the forest several days later screaming "They're coming, save yourselves!" to passers by. This sort of thing is always good to know.

We were collected from the Coconut Beach resort in a mini-van and driven along a dirt track which threw us all around in the back for some time until eventually we reached a large grass filled clearing in the forest and parked up. We were all supplied with torches just large enough to light up an area of about two square feet around us, and followed our guide through a small opening in the trees into the pitch black forest beyond. One of the most obvious differences in the rainforest at night is the level of sound. During the day things aren't exactly quiet, what with the odd rustle of something trying to find its way through the undergrowth and birds calling out from the treetops to either warn each other about the things in the undergrowth or to see if any other birds in the vicinity are up for a quickie - although David Attenborough usually puts it slightly more succinctly. Once the sun starts to go down, however, it seems as though every creature known to man comes out of its hiding place and immediately feels the need to let every other living thing for miles around know of its presence. I'm sure I don't need to describe the sort of gibbering, whooping, slithering noises you can expect from the forest after dark - you've all seen the nature documentaries. Suffice to say that doing a nocturnal walk surrounded by this cacophony of sound, following a guide who was leading us deeper into a place I had previously thought only existed in hammer horror movies, probably knee deep in scuttling things but not having the guts to actually point the torch at the ground to find out, was an experience unlike any I'd had before.

For two hours we traipsed happily through the forest in single file, weaving in and out of the trees and stopping every now and then either because our guide had stopped to show us something or the person in front had decided to tie their shoelaces unexpectedly and we'd all fallen over them in the dark. Quite often, the guide would have us crowd around some innocent looking tree, wait until we were all holding our breath expectantly, and then point his torch at a huge spider with dripping fangs or a grasshopper the size of a small car and say "Now this is a good example of hippitty hoppitus the man eating tree frog" before laughing at our panicked reaction and revealing that it was, in fact, an ordinary garden frog. One thing you can always be sure of in Australia is that tour guides, if they're not telling tall tales or exaggerating things for effect, will generally be trying very hard to scare the willies out of you.

Returning to the van after a couple of hours of feeling our way through the forest in the dark, our guide was clearly still as lively as ever and still eager to show us more. While we stood around, he scuttled off into the trees and returned a few minutes later with his hands clutched firmly around something which didn't look particularly happy with the situation. A couple of us backed away quickly or got back in the van, fully expecting that anything collected from the Daintree rainforest was likely to be out to get us, but what our guide wanted to show us turned out to be nothing more than a common cane toad. Well, I say nothing more - the cane toad isn't exactly one of Australia's most beloved of creatures, so much so that mentioning it's name in certain circles is enough to get you lynched. Prior to 1935 Australia was noticeably devoid of any toads whatsoever, but what it did have in abundance was the cane beetle, a deceptively harmless looking insect which would happily munch it's way through an entire field of sugar cane in less time than it would take you to make a cup of tea. Needless to say, when somebody heard that Hawaii was successfully eradicating the cane beetle by setting the local toad population on them, they wasted no time in flying over and acquiring a box for themselves. And so it was that a mere one hundred and two of these innocent looking creatures were introduced into Australia and released onto the unsuspecting cane beetle population in northern Queensland. Unfortunately, nobody had thought to do any research prior to bringing the toads into the country, and so it came as a total surprise to everybody to discover some time later that a single cane toad could spawn up to 60,000 eggs in one go and that they developed so fast that they could find and eat all the food before native frogs could get to it, essentially threatening the local population. As if this wasn't enough, the cane toad is actually poisonous - so it doesn't have any natural predators to keep its numbers down. Many small reptiles and other animals (including small dogs) which eat or lick the toads simply drop down dead - snakes have been found which have been so rapidly killed by the toad's poison that the toad was still trapped in it's mouth unswallowed. The cane toad is now profilific across Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territories, and is spreading fast. I think it's pretty safe to say that, on a scale of one to ten of environmental disasters, the introduction of the cane toad to Australia ranks about thirty! In a supreme example of irony, it also turned out that the cane toad wasn't actually very good at jumping and was totally useless at catching cane beetles which lived on the higher stalks of the sugar cane - and at exactly the time when the cane beetle larvae were emerging from the ground to create a new generation of menace, making a sitting target for anything that might like to eat them, the cane toads were too busy hibernating to take the slightest notice. So, all in all, introducing the cane toad to Australia had done nothing but create a bigger menace than there had been in the first place - a menace which firmly refuses to go away (2).

(1) To be fair, I did stay at the Crocodylus way back in 1998 and as of 2008 their website now boasts about the bar and restaurant and internet facilities they have on offer. Naturally, I can only recount my own experiences here, but things do change over time. In a way, though, it would be a shame if the Crocodylus had suddenly become much the same as PK's. After all, a hell of a lot of people would very much welcome the idea of really getting away from things, sleeping in a large tent and not being surrounded by internet ready computers.

(2) It is, of course, very easy to hate something like a cane toad which has a face which looks as though it wants to be hated in the first place. In New Zealand, however, many people seem to have aimed their combined hatred at the wholly more lovable Possum. In Australia, the Possum is endangered (many of the trees it eats have defences against it) and is therefore protected and seen as something of a local celebrity - as immortalised by Dame Edna Everage with her famous "Hello Possums" greeting. In New Zealand, however, the Possum is far from endangered - there are, at last calculation, something like twenty of them for every single human being in the country. Far from being protective towards them, New Zealanders see possums as a pest and will do anything they can to wipe them out. This came as something of a surprise to Eloise and I, who found ourselves during our tour of New Zealand (of which more in another book) pointing and saying "Oh, look at the cute little possum" while the tour guide was proudly telling us how he'd once killed three with a brick because they came within two hundred yards of his garden, and how the only good possum was a dead possum.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.