Daintree rainforest, Queensland: Mossman Gorge Cultural Centre guided walk through the forest older than the Amazon

The Daintree is an ancient rainforest dating back 130 million years (about 110 million years older than the Amazon).Credit: Tourism and Events Queensland

Tom Creek stands beside a pool in a part of the Daintree rainforest most visitors to Mossman Gorge never witness.

"This morning one of our female guides saw a juvenile cassowary soaking itself here," says our Indigenous guide born and raised in the Kuku Yalanji community.

The Daintree is an ancient rainforest dating back 130 million years (about 110 million years older than the Amazon) - and cassowaries are cunning, elusive and dangerous: the avian equivalent of crocodiles.

Discover the Daintree on the Ngadiku Dreamtime Walk.

Creek assures us the bathing cassowary has gone.

"But we don't know what lurks beneath these leaves in the pond," Creek continues, building suspense. "It could be a snake or an eel."

Instead he takes a few leaves, rubs them and creates a soap lather.

A few minutes earlier on the gentle 90-minute walk by the side of the Rex River which flows into the Daintree, Creek had peeled a blue Cassowary plum beloved by the bird but poisonous to humans.

"We can't eat them," Creek says before throwing pieces of the fruit into the rampaging waters. "But we can sure eat the jungle perch who feed on them."

We're on this walk to celebrate the 10th anniversary of one of the most successful Indigenous tourism initiatives in Australia. Before the creation of the renamed Mossman Gorge Cultural Centre in 2012 - inspired by local visionary, Roy Gibson - only one per cent of visitors to the gorge knew anything about the local people who have been custodians of the Daintree since time immemorial.

Rachael Hodges, the centre's general manager, says visitors would race along the road to the gorge as if they were competing at Bathurst and park their modern versions of Kombis.

Then backpackers would strip down to their budgie smugglers and bikinis for another bucket list memory, jumping into mountain-cold water that might have emerged from the Dreamtime.

Now every visitor has to park at the cultural centre - with its cafe, ever-changing gallery featuring local artists, and informative exhibits, before or after taking the shuttle to the most crowded part of the gorge.

By contrast, the gentle two-hour guided walk Creek helped create under Gibson's tutelage is not even two kilometres upstream, but utterly intimate.

Gibson patiently consulted his fellow elders, negotiating a trek that would avoid sacred sites but introduce non-Indigenous visitors to Kuku Yalanji culture.

"This rainforest is our supermarket," Creek says. "See these fruits? Hear the birds? Spot the animal tracks?"

He stops at a red cedar tree, pointing at a scar in its buttress.

"The (white colonial) loggers who came here were greedy. They took whole trees 30 metres high and up to 500 years old. My people asked the spirits living inside the tree for permission to shape a boomerang or a shield so it could continue growing."

A minute later he pauses and grasps a stinging nettle in his right hand.

The hairs on his right arm immediately stand to attention from the poison while those on his left arm are relaxed.

"These stinging nettles are very painful," he says. "So never use them as toilet paper!"

He stops at the hollow base of a base of strangle fig where the host trunk used to be.

"We call these burial trees," Creek says. "Some people still ask to be buried here, knowing they will be embraced by nature."

The Indigenous-run Mossman Gorge Cultural Centre has profoundly enriched the tourist experience to the Daintree. It used to be a jaunt in the rainforest; a quick dip in the spring waters below the waterfall; then a hasty retreat back to the modern lures of Port Douglas or Cairns.

Don't cheat yourself.

The Daintree deserves to be discovered. And this guided walk is much cheaper than flying to the Amazon, its much younger sister.

THE DETAILS

TOUR

Mossman Gorge Cultural Centre provides a $13.50 shuttle bus return ticket ($6.60 children) to the part of the gorge open to the public.

Or book an intimate Ngadiku Dreamtime Walk: $86.50 adults, $43.25 children.

mossmangorge.com.au

EAT/SHOP

The cafe (training local youth in hospitality) serves family food at reasonable prices. But the highlight is the indigenous gallery focusing on Kuku Yalanji artists and locally sourced aboriginal clothing.

MORE

Traveller.com.au/tropical-north-queensland.

Steve Meacham visited as a guest of Voyages Indigenous Tourism.