Trails and Tribulation: A Renegade adventure

There is a subtle yet inescapable look that a man gives you when you ask for his help in towing out your bogged vehicle... A kind of chin-raised chipperness that says: "Yes, clearly I am more manly than you, hapless stranger".

It's also, among the four-wheel-driving faithful, a look of almost delirious joy, because snatch-strapping, winching or even pushing cars out of sticky strife is one of their great passions. Right up there with bumper-sticker collecting and beard growing!

If the car you've mired in a mud-hell is the new bright, shiny and entree-sized Jeep Renegade, however, you'll also be rewarded with sly glances that suggest you may have misplaced your man vegetables, probably at a Jeep dealer.

The Renegade does not look like a serious off-roading tool, just as a teaspoon does not look useful for digging trenches. It is, in fact, a Jeep for people who care not one damn about the brand's proud heritage as a maker of tough, war-faring trucks that look like they were designed before mankind worked out how to fashion metal into curved shapes.

In fact, almost 90 per cent of the Renegades that will soon be sold in this country will be front-wheel drive only, and will spend most of their time shuttling young people who really want a Jeep Wrangler, but can't afford and/or park one properly yet, around cities and towns.

The car's designer, Mark Allen, told us he didn't want this small SUV to be too cute, but he may have failed in his mission... Particularly in the interior, which is splashed with colour and slightly girly graphic touches, so much so that when Mick or Barry (or Mick Barry, all the blokes who stopped to help us seemed to have one name) dropped into the driver's seat to attempt to drive us out of the sludge pit we'd buried the Renegade in, he visibly shuddered.

In an attempt to test just how far Jeep has strayed from its core values of Rubicon Trail-tackling toughness, we'd decided to take a Renegade (of typical bright orange hue) through the epic, awesome and seemingly impenetrable Daintree Forest in Far North Queensland. Our destination was Cape Tribulation, and beyond: a place well beyond the coffee-shop strip where most of these vehicles will chunter through most of their kilometres.

Fortunately, Jeep does offer a special, take-me-seriously version of the Renegade for this kind of adventure, the Trailhawk, which gets on-demand four-wheel drive, a Selec-Terrain system, better ground clearance and a bigger engine. The latter is the 2.4-litre "Tigershark" – rather larger and more butch than the wheezy 1.4-litre turbo in the Sport model, which will take the bulk of sales.

The Trailhawk, a concept that resembles putting lycra and running shoes on Joe Hockey, will appeal to around 10 per cent of buyers (by Jeep's own estimates), and those few will happily shell out a whopping $41,500 for the privilege of looking like they could get rugged, even if they never will.

Jeep puts a big, shiny red Trail Rated stamp on vehicles that it determines are capable of proper off-roading. With that logo of approval, we were assured, we could climb every mountain and drive damn near into the sea, and the roads leading to the Cape seem to offer plenty of opportunity.

Tourism being as a big a business as it is in FNQ, however, you can actually drive to one of our more remote and spectacular beaches, the place where the world's oldest rain forest (more than 100 million years, which is more ancient than the Amazon) meets the world's most feted reef (astronauts are big fans, because you can see it from space), with some ease.

We vowed, therefore, to make our journey as rugged as possible by taking every detour that looked like it might place us, and our Renegade, in peril.

As a result we found ourselves fording streams and climbing tracks of such steepness they would give a mountain goat pause, just outside Daintree Village. While the switchable four-wheel-drive system coped well with all of this, the 2.4-litre engine, with its less than muscular 129kW and 230Nm (an amount of grunt that's only impressive when compared to the 1.4's 103kW and 230Nm) did, at times, feel like it was considering giving up the ghost when we pointed its nose at the sky and asked it to scale a grassy cliff.

Aside from our mischievous meanderings, we were mainly on sealed roads, where the Renegade proved itself capable rather than inspiring, with decent steering but no small amount of body roll in fast corners – and a reluctance to change direction of almost Tony Abbott levels.

To enter the rain forest proper, you take a car ferry across the Daintree River, which looks like the sort of place crocodiles would choose for their holidays. A local council worker, "JustcallmePete-eh?", told us he'd counted 27 of them along one stretch the week before.

He also advised us to take the bright yellow signs that festoon most beaches up here, warning of crocodile attacks that can cause "serious injury or death" very seriously. Probably death, mostly...

"Yep, they can be in the ocean, or on the beach," he nodded, jovially.

"That's why I never, ever swim in the ocean up here. That and the sharks. Bloody shark's going to have to learn to walk if he wants me."

The other highly frequent warning signs suggest you be wary of cassowaries, a flightless but fighty bird with a claw on each foot that brings to mind that great Sam Neill scene with the kid at the start of Jurassic Park, where he talks about being eviscerated.

Pete tells us his record is seeing 15 cassowaries in one day, but also tells us they're very good at hiding, and they could be right at the edge of the road and we wouldn't see them. Excellent.

Throw in the snakes and the box jelly fish and the Daintree starts to sound like a hostile place that has its dark, leafy heart set on killing you.

Fortunately, it doesn't feel like this at all. Unlike the baking, searing red heat of the outback (which feels like it would happily whiten your bones), this ancient rain forest simply surrounds you in wonder, beauty and a kind of thick, warm silence, broken only by running water or chortling birds.

The further off the beaten track you go, which we did repeatedly, the more impressive it is, life growing upon life in a kind of engorged ecology. Vines wrap around branches which wrap around ferns and climb tree trunks rippling with life. There are plants here that predate the dinosaurs and cycads that grow only a metre every hundred years, yet stand 15 or 20 metres tall.

One of the tricks to the Daintree's longevity is that, unlike our other forests, it does not burn, not even from lightning strikes, partly because it is so verdant and wet, and partly because it contains none of the oil-rich eucalypts that make Australia's southern parts a tinder box.

The beaches here are also something else, all white sand and foliage spanned, lapped on by the beautiful aqua of the Coral Sea, and oh so tempting to swim in.

They can also be tempting to drive on, in some cases, and this led to our first proper test of the Renegade's abilities at a place called Thornton's Beach, after I'd parked it for a photo and returned to find its wheels being lapped at by the tide.

What had been firm-packed sand was now more like the sludge at the bottom of a fish tank, and engaging full-time four-wheel drive in the Selec-Terrain's Auto mode did nothing but bury my wheels further and my heart into my stomach.

Switching, hopefully, to the Sand setting did the trick brilliantly, however, slowly but surely finding traction and pulling us out of the mire as the sun set and the shadows seemed to fill with hidden crocs and cranky cassowaries. Safe in our Renegade we tore up and down the sand, marvelling at the freedom of beach bashing an SUV.

The next morning we pushed on to Cape Tribulation, where the road runs out and you stagger through a tunnel of trees onto an unspoilt vista of truly wild looking beach.

From here, it's a 100km four-wheel-drive-only track to Cooktown, which starts off as reasonable graded gravel and then deteriorates to the kind of ruts that threaten to shake not only your car apart, but your will to live. One Cairns cowboy told us he'd done the drive before in a Subaru Forester, with ease, so ground clearance isn't the problem, at least in the dry season... It's more a case of stamina.

The Renegade had survived everything we'd thrown at it thus far, and its cabin (a surprisingly roomy place thanks to its boxy design, which even offers decent legroom in the rear, but falls down badly when it comes to boot space) had proved highly comfortable and cosseting. This is despite hefty road noise, and some buzzing from the removable roof panels.

It was our decision to test it one last time on the way home, of course, that brought us undone.

Ploughing into a cane field, because it looked tricky and sticky, I noticed that the ground underneath was slightly boggy, but felt safe traversing it without engaging 4WD. When I tried to turn around to get out again, however, I got that sinking feeling, and this time no amount of button twiddling, praying or quietly swearing would pull us out.

The snapper and I pushed, pulled, prodded and placed branches under the wheels, all to no avail, leaving us with no option but to flag down a convoy of serious off-roaders in matching polo shirts who'd come all the way from Canberra for a once-in-a-lifetime Cape crusade.

They gazed upon us with that look of pity and quiet victory and commented unkindly on our choice of vehicle, and how hopelessly lacking in grip our road-biased tyres were. This all before bringing a LandCruiser down to our level and winching us, embarrassed and mud-caked, back to the road...

Breaking into the tut-tutting of one of these generous fellows, I asked him: "Do any of you serious, hirsute off-road types ever say 'I bought a Jeep'?"

"Nah, mate, never. Too many issues," he answered, earnestly, and with some sympathy.

The intended purpose of Jeeps of old might have been carrying gun-toting Americans wherever they needed to go to shoot things, but their Unique Selling Point has changed markedly over the years, and never more so than with the Renegade.

It might not be able to handle a muddy field the way a Wrangler or a Cherokee would, but its core market won't get a single wrinkle in their Botoxed foreheads worrying about that.

Nor will they ever suffer the ignominy of being towed out of a Westfield carpark, unless they break down of course. But Jeeps don't do that, do they?