Half an hour later we were in Daintree – the end of the line – a small slumbrous settlement with an almost sinisterly enticing end of the line atmosphere. Probably no more than about sixty people lived in and around Daintree but they had only recently been at the centre of two intensely bitter and highly publicized feuds. The first related to the creation of what the local Shire Council chose to refer to in its publications as ‘That Road’, thereby giving it a harmless, tabloid-type storm in a teacup notoriety. Whereas what ‘That Road’ in fact entailed was 32 kilometres of fiercely contested construction through an area of National Park, already itself unstable and having serious ecological bearing on the World Heritage Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Its ostensible purpose was to link Cape Tribulation to Bloomfield, thereby completing the coastal route between Cooktown and Cairns; though it didn’t escape the notice of conservationists (a) that other adequate roads already existed, and (b) that the main advantage of this one would be the provision of access to valuable chunks of real estate. They sat down in front of bulldozers in large numbers, and in large numbers were arrested. ‘The actions of protestors, although determined,’ the Shire Council pamphlet in my possession crowed, ‘proved to be of little more than nuisance value, and failed to delay the project.’ ‘That Road’ went through, large tracts of rare coastal rainforest came down, and the community was left divided.

In the meantime Daintree had become a sort of sanctuary and reliquary that pilgrims such as Carlos from the Peace Train had to visit – ‘I just can’t wait to get up there and, you know, just suss its vibes,’ he’d told me – a pagan holy place, a shrine for wilderness freaks and tree-worshippers. Amongst whom, now that I had done obeisance through the windows of a submarine to the Tritons, I was prepared to number myself.