Down-Under Beauty

It requires a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get to this isolated and beautiful corner of the earth. You drive to the point where a fast-flowing river cuts off the road -- a river infested with crocodiles, our friends inform us. As we wait for the small ferry to come and carry us across, they tell us about the gruesome habits of crocodiles, including their infamous "death roll," in which they roll a victim over and over until he or she drowns, then place the unfortunate one under a log for a little decomposing before dinner. We are careful to stay toward the center of the ferry as it slowly crosses the river.

The crocodiles are not the only danger in this part of the world. We are warned about pythons and "stinging trees" as we make our way deeper into northeastern Australia's beautiful Daintree rainforest. Jim and I have come Down Under for a national Christian youth convention in Perth and a church meeting in Sydney, but these few days with our friends in Australia's northern tropics are pure vacation.

At the start of our visit, while still recovering from a day lost in time and rather severe cases of jet lag, we ventured to a gorge in another part of the rainforest. As the bracing water of the pool beneath a plunging, ribbon waterfall erased our exhaustion, a warm rain poured out of the sky. The rain is strange here -- it can hit one bank of the narrow gorge and miss the other, or soak one partner in a conversation while leaving the other dry. It exits as abruptly as it appears.

At midday in Daintree, the sun streams down through thick, tall growth. A paradoxical feeling of suffocating closeness and immense expansiveness overwhelms the visitor to this place. The fan palms become brilliant green parasols, making shade for the creatures on the forest floor. A strange lizard scampers on its hind legs in a hilarious dance across our path.

We come to the place of "bouncing stones." A pebble thrown upon a stone will fly far out into the ocean, to be returned later on an incoming tide. This is a sacred site to Australia's aboriginal people, who had this land taken from them by white settlers 200 years ago. The first whites called Australia "land of no people."

DAINTREE IS UNIQUE among the world's rainforests -- its green expanse reaches right to the ocean. There are deadly "stingers" -- large, poisonous jellyfish -- in the ocean's clear, aqua waters, and crocodiles are abundant at the estuaries where Daintree's rivers spill into the Pacific. But the unspeakable beauty makes the hidden dangers seem unreal.

Before heading home, we stop at an amazing orchard on one edge of the rainforest. Three thousand tropical fruit trees -- brought over the years as seeds from distant corners of the globe -- are being cultivated for their exotic fruit. We sample passionfruit and papaya, thick fibrous fruits and long slender ones with names I can't remember but tastes unforgettable. Jim is offered a small red "miracle fruit," which coats the mouth and makes a slice of lime taste as sweet as sugar, according to his testimony. Time is running out for catching the last ferry across the river, but we cannot pass up the challenge to bite the back end of a "lime ant" to enjoy a traditional aboriginal taste treat.

As we tear back over the rutted road, high above the depths of the rainforest, a huge rainbow plunges out of the heavens down into the massive green growth. Clouds shift and the rains fall, letting up just as we catch the last ferry. As the clouds part, a flurry of bats comes out of nowhere and circles the river in the foreground of a setting orange sun.

This place teeming with life seems even busier when the sun disappears. The buzz of strange bugs and beasts and birds reaches a fever pitch as twilight descends.

But there is another, seemingly irrepressible, sound in the rainforest. It is the sound of bulldozers. We heard them clearing a road to the coast. We saw them knocking down gigantic trees, making way for private homes and resorts.

It is a tragic sound in too many corners of the earth. It is upsetting our ecology and threatening our future. And, like many things, the tragedy seems more profound when it is something you have been enthralled by and come to respect that is in danger.

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.