Long before it was a tourist village, this rainforest was - and remains - the Country of the Djabugay and Buluwai peoples, who have lived in the Kuranda region for tens of thousands of years. Their presence here is not a historical footnote but a continuous thread; their creation stories, centred on the ancestral being Buda-dji the carpet snake, are written into the rivers and ranges around the town. The forest that day-trippers admire from a gondola is ancestral ground, named and known in detail long before any railway surveyor arrived. To understand Kuranda is to understand that the spectacular landscape it sells was someone's home for two thousand generations, and still is.

The Kuranda Scenic Railway is the reason the village exists in its modern form, and it remains one of the great railway journeys anywhere. Built to service the goldfields and tin mines of the tableland, construction began in 1887 and the line reached Kuranda in 1891. Crews carved fifteen tunnels and threw thirty-seven bridges across the gorge by hand, working on slopes so steep and unstable that the project cost lives. The graceful Kuranda railway station, draped in tropical plants, was added in 1915 and is often called the prettiest in Australia. Today two trains a day make the leisurely ninety-minute climb, 328 metres up and 34 kilometres out from Cairns, past Barron Falls and through rainforest the workers once fought through inch by inch.

The other way up is newer and stranger: the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway, opened in 1995, which carries you in a six-person gondola high above the forest between Smithfield and Kuranda. The contrast is the whole appeal - the railway burrows through the gorge while the cableway glides over the canopy, two different ways of crossing the same World Heritage rainforest. Many visitors do exactly that, riding the train up in the morning and the Skyrail down in the afternoon (or the reverse), turning the journey itself into the main event. Both stop at Barron Falls, so the gorge's centrepiece gets seen from two angles. Kuranda, in the middle, is where the two methods meet.

Kuranda's markets are its beating heart, and they began with a counter-cultural impulse. In 1978 a group of local artists and craftspeople set up the Original Rainforest Markets, and the village has been a maker's town ever since. Today the markets run daily, crammed with crafts, art, food and local produce in lanes shaded by rainforest. They open at nine and most stalls close when the last train leaves, giving the village its peculiar daily rhythm of arrival, crowd and quiet. The wildlife attractions cluster at the village's northern end - the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary, opened in 1987, where huge electric-blue Ulysses butterflies drift through a rainforest aviary, and Birdworld, a family-run walk-through habitat going since 1980.

There is a Kuranda most day-trippers never see. The streets are hilly and barely a kilometre end to end, easy to walk if the crowds let you, but the place reveals itself only when the trains and gondolas stop running. The buses empty, the stalls fold up, and the village settles back into the rainforest that surrounds it on every side. The forest does not respect the tourist timetable. After dark it fills with the sounds of a Wet Tropics night - frogs, possums, the rustle of things moving in the canopy - and the village in the rainforest becomes, briefly, just a small town in an extraordinarily old forest, exactly as its name suggests.