They were pleasant – but I didn’t try to engage them in too much conversation. They were on a honeymoon, after all.I was keeping a low profile: bush-walking in the morning, holing up in the relative cool of my cabin after midday to work on a new novel. It was gradually establishing itself as a unique retreat – though, when I was there it was still low season (right after the Daintree’s annual bout of monsoons), so the only other guests were a honeymoon couple They were called Chris and Alice. His wife, Joan, was also welcoming – a thin, spindly woman who, five years earlier, had followed her husband into this back-of-beyond hinterland with the idea of creating a wilderness lodge in the middle of nowhere.And now, the lodge was finally up and running.

Jack was the archetypal Australian bloke, writ large: chummy, beefy, beer-gutted, no hint of reserve. There was a main lodge building and six simple cabins, all built on stilts, all eco-friendly, all the brainchild of a 60-year-old former property developer from Brisbane I’ll call Jack Hamilton (all names in this essay have been changed). As light receded and a nocturnal soundtrack of sinister ornithological cackles broached the silence, you found yourself thinking: this is, verily, a haunted Eden.The lodge in which I was billeted was located somewhere in the midst of this forest primeval. The further north you travelled into this jungly void, the less sky you saw – as the canopy of the forest was so dense that it closed in over you. To get there required negotiating a very bad road which was unsealed for the last 60 miles. A short ride on a barge was also involved – as you had to forge a river, the banks of which were used as sleeping quarters for the local contingent of crocodiles. Night was the only real time you could drink in the rainforest – something I found out my first day there, when I downed a beer in the absurd hothouse heat of noon and felt as if I had walked straight into a sucker punch.
I was staying in a wilderness lodge situated smack dab in the middle of the Daintree – one of the few extant rainforests still left on the Australian continent It was located two hours north of the town of Cairns.

Any activity involving physical movement was like wading through a vat of goo. By nightfall, however, a hint of coolness descended upon this corner of Far North Queensland – and you suddenly discovered a renewed capacity for alcohol. T DAWN in the Daintree, it was hot By early morning, the mercury was scraping three figures By midday, the sun was at full wattage The humidity was inching into sauna-room levels. It has a 26ft sitting room and a 13ft study, and is for sale through Carter Jonas for pounds 245,000 For details call 01223 368771..

The four-bedroom house for sale was built under 10 years ago – on 27 steel piles. On a no-through road on the edge of the village, they all have large balconies on ground and first floors, overhanging the water. It is for sale at pounds 325,000, through Strutt & Parker, 01273 475411.TOAD HALL OVERHANGS LAKETOAD HALL is one of seven contemporary houses fronting a lake at Haddenham, 15 miles from Cambridge. The four-bedroom house has a 31ft kitchen with Neff appliances, wine rack and air conditioning. The former gamekeeper’s cottage may enjoy rural bliss, but sharing creature comforts does not usually extend to amphibians. The three-bedroom main house’s 25ft sitting room has an inglenook fireplace and wrought iron stairs leading to the first-floor annexe The gardens cover a third of an acre.