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Hit and bliss in FNQ

Bryan Martin

Manhood crossing ... ''Don't worry, honey, one day you'll cross that creek,'' which is like saying one day, love, you'll be a man.
Manhood crossing ... ''Don't worry, honey, one day you'll cross that creek,'' which is like saying one day, love, you'll be a man.Supplied

Once you cross the Daintree in far north Queensland, normal services might never be resumed. As you pay the ferryman (a woman really) to cross the croc-infested river, say goodbye to phone calls, texts, email, everything. You feel panic at first but it slowly fades to a slight concern, then you forget even where your phone is. Bliss.

Cape Tribulation stretches from this river up to Emmagen Creek where there is a big sign saying four-wheel-drives only, marking the start of the Bloomfield Track.

I stand there quite inconsolable watching laden cruisers cross the shallow creek and climb the steep bank on the other side. It feels like a frontier not only to the four-wheel-drive track but to your manhood. I look at our hired Ford Territory, really just a big Falcon, which has no chance of getting across the knee-deep water, let alone the track, even if Thrifty allowed it. My wife tries to help, saying, ''Don't worry, honey, one day you'll cross that creek,'' which is like saying one day, love, you'll be a man.

Slice of tropical heaven ... Negroni cocktail with a twist of far north Queensland. Photo: David Reist
Slice of tropical heaven ... Negroni cocktail with a twist of far north Queensland. Photo: David ReistSupplied
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There is just so much to do here in the Daintree. It's like a tropical version of Queenstown or Interlaken.

Each day starts like the previous, being woken by the huge thud on the canvass roof of our tent at the Crocodylus resort. It's probably just the fruit from the noah tree and not that big, just a hard green walnut, but it's coming from a great height, 30 metres up, so achieves terminal velocity just as it smacks into the roof.

We're up at dawn for a four-hour ocean kayak voyage with our guide Cole, who, like many people here has come from elsewhere to become a local. He just lives down the road and does tours when called for, and otherwise just hangs around, it seems.

Hardly anyone makes the journey out of their Port Douglas pool bar to see what's on the wildside.

The kayak adventure is a great way of seeing the coastline off Cow Bay, where you can snorkel off empty beaches, just the five of us and Cole. It seems crazy that you get this attention. We swim ashore at a beach that has an old World War II bunker and no other signs of life other than the tracks of countless forms of wildlife, which must have had a beach party last night.

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Cole appears with the best carrot cake I've had, and I've no idea where he got it from. I couldn't be more surprised if he had appeared in a clown outfit, juggling sea urchins.

Later that day, we're rappelling and belaying through huge 600-year-old trees in the Noah Range, said to be the oldest rainforest in the world. Jungle surfing, as this is known, involves being strapped into a harness and traversing the tree tops 20 metres above the rainforest floor.

It's heady stuff; a team of young experts, including the dashing and well-painted and pierced ''flying Dutchman'', shimmy ahead to drag you on to the next platform, passing on loads of detail about where you are, what's below you and how it got here.

After the last run, which you have to do upside down, the madmen who have been your escorts, let you descend, wobbly, to the ground and marvel at how far you've come.

Later, a night walk through the rainforest near our tent city reveals a huge array of flora and fauna, trees that form the various layers in the forest canopy or are competing to get there.

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An old tree that has been basically strangled and crushed by a climbing fig, which has used the old tree as a support for 100 years or so, then figuring it is OK on its own shoots out huge buttress roots in all directions.

There's the ever-present weed, wait-a-while - whose thorny tendrils take over whole sections of forest, strangling out everything else - and if you get caught in the barbs, well you have to wait a while to get out.

The fruit trees also, like the casurina plum, drop thousands of yellow fruits trying to attract a mysterious bird to spread the seed. Bush foods like quandong, Davidson plums and tamarind carpet the floor. An amesthine python, three metres long, crosses our path, goannas and all sorts of furry marsupials scurry under the low-lying bush.

And this is all before we walk 10 metres from the bar. Our guide is Steve, who is also the barman. He's a deft hand at the local cocktail, a stubby of ''Effen Q'' (FNQ) lager, where you take a swig and it gets filled back to the top with bundy, and is also barista of the strongest coffee this side of mocha.

Steve dropped out of his career as an industrial chemist to run the village and seems to know everything about the forest that we're walking through, ending up at the most beautiful moonlit billabong. Filled with water lilies, reflected stars and no doubt one huge effen croc.

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You cannot come all this way and not head out to the reef. Last time, we went out from Cairns on a huge boat with 300 others to a reef so small and washed out and crowded with floating humanity that I really didn't have a huge desire to see it again. This time we walk out from Myall Beach, 20 souls is all, to Mackay Reef, a 25-minute, 25-knot cruise on a small inflatable. The captain is Cane, a young local, who like so many others, launches into such a detailed unpacking of what the Daintree and reef mean to him that you find yourself looking for reasons to upend your life and move here.

The Mackay Reef is around a long sand island and we hit it at a very low tide. We see coral, fish, turtles, giant clams, sharks, rays, and just about every Finding Nemo cast member, including amazing cleaning stations where a pair of wrasse clean the gills, mouth, scales from a queue of fish large and small. Even the plentiful turtles patiently wait their turn.

After two hours of tropical aquatic overload, we head back with a following sea, everyone amazed at what we've seen. I still can't believe it's not booked solid, but that's Cape Trib. Hardly anyone makes the journey out of their Port Douglas pool bar to see what's on the wildside.

Speaking of which, it's time for us to head back, after a final coffee from Steve that puts more caffeine in my bloodstream than a case of Red Bull.

We cross back over the river and all our phones start to buzz and carry on, hundreds of texts, emails, snapchats. The suddenness of the return to modern life shakes your core.

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I look back in desperation, wanting so much to do a U-turn and go north, cross that creek, make it to Wujal.

We end up at the QT Resort at Port Douglas, feeling totally out of place. What does QT stand for? Quite tame? It's so white and clean here, I can see three bars from where I stand plus the all-you-can-eat-buffet being set up. Dozens of versions of yourself lounge around gardens and pools, families and the odd angry-looking honeymoon couple no doubt forming a class action against the travel agent who put them fair square in a family resort during school holidays.

QT is the opposite of where we have been, its tilt at eco-tourism is to advise you to turn the aircon to 18 degrees and hang your towels to dry.

The villas are named after the cocktail menu: daiquiri, martini, mojito etc. So all you have to do is get sloshed on white rum and you know to stumble towards Daiquiri to find your bed.

Before the buffet, I ask the colourfully dressed barman if he can rustle together a negroni. Yes, I know I'll be on my own trying to find the apartment.

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He gives a wink, disappears out the back, emerges with a few shots of a dark red liquid and proceeds to make the best negroni I've ever had.

The bitters, gin and vermouth are barrel aged, and the glass prepared carefully, and the taste is amazing. All my doubts have vanished. Anywhere that knows this drink so well has depth. I pull up a stool and have another.

I'm no fan of buffets. But once we're shown the buffet at QT - maybe it stands for quite tipsy - my view on that changes as well. There's so much fresh seafood here - Pacific oysters, sand crabs, mussels, plump prawns. Plus casseroles like kingfish and cannelloni beans, braised beef cheeks, chicken tagines, and tasting plates of soft shell crab, rillettes and wobbly pork belly, fresh-cooked asparagus and beetroot, grilled steaks and steamed pork buns.

A solid winelist tops the night. Sure, I'd still rather be north of the Daintree, but the food and beverage department here is outstanding.

Our trip ends with a drive out to the Undara Lava Tubes, right across the Atherton Tablelands, where Opera Outback is performing Donizetti's L'Elisir D'Amore in a bush setting.

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Una furtiva lagrima sums up the little tears I shed to leave FNQ for sub-zero Canberra.


Negroni

For each cocktail

1 part London-style dry gin

1 part Campari

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1 part Carpano Antica or Martini Rosso red vermouth

2 parts blood orange juice

Mix together the alcohol. Cut off a section of the blood orange zest, about a quarter of the skin. Put ice into two old-fashioned glasses with ice. Rub the zest around the rim of the glasses so you leave an oily smear. Stir the mixed spirits over ice in a separate cocktail glass and strain into the glasses. Squeeze in the orange juice, stir carefully and serve. To make it an FNQ negroni, add Davidson plum flesh to the cocktail before you stir it.

>> Bryan Martin is winemaker at Ravensworth and Clonakilla, bryanmartin.com.au.

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