Take only photographs. Leave only footprints. Our guide seriously dictated the ruses as we approached the rainforest. The Cradle Mountain region, considered by the World Heritage Commission to be one of the planet's most precious places, is an undisturbed sample of the earth's ancient evolutionary history. Land formations over a million years old are the natural habitat of nearly extinct wildlife.
Anthropologists study the history documented in primitive aboriginal carvings on cave walls.
Quietly, we followed a woodplank path, erected to protect rare coral grasses. It led us through exotic forests of pepper trees, fat cider gums and skinny pencil pines to a spectacular waterfall. It was a bowered fantasy - a glistening, velvety green, Hansel and Gretel Fairytale setting. Gnarled, moss-covered myrtle trees and giant flowering regnans shaded a riverside path where delicate streams of sunlight filtered through a jungle of leaves. I meandered at whim in the hush of this dewy paradise, deeply inhaling the perfume of the rainforest's lush vegetation.