I’d say it’s a must-do, so think of it as much-needed exercise after days of lying in the sun on some of the best beaches in the world. Some days, life’s just tough.

Home to the coco de mer palm, this nature reserve is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List and it even has a bigger national park around it to form a buffer zone from anything that could damage its precious eco-system. As I said, this is pretty special.

It’s on Praslin, a small and perfect island which takes 50 minutes by boat from its big brother Mahé, where we were staying. You leave one earthly paradise for another, then visit something you can’t see anywhere else in the world. A good day out, I’d say.

The reserve is roughly 50 acres of prehistoric forest which has lain unchanged for millions of years. UNESCO describes it like this: “The Vallée de Mai constitutes a living laboratory, illustrating of what other tropical areas would have been before the advent of more advanced plant families.” That’s amazing.

You can choose how you want to see the reserve; it took us about two hours to walk through and round it, on really well-maintained dirt paths. Trees and plants are labelled, which is useful because most were things I’d never seen before. We chose to go-it-alone, although you can hire guides and twice a day there are free 40-minute guided tours, a great option if the timing coincides with your visit.

The important thing about your walk is that the pathways are slightly above the forest floor, to allow the trees to grow, live and die at their own pace, untroubled by what us humans do to the planet everywhere else.

The result is a tangled mess of dead palm fronds and dying branches that are all working together to make the best mulch the new saplings could wish for. You shouldn’t touch them, and certainly can’t take anything away, you can’t smoke in the forest, nor drop rubbish. But why would you want to, when there’s so much to see along the way?

For starters, this is the habitat of the Seychelles’ national bird, the (very shy) black parrot. The forest is also home to the bronze gecko, blue pigeons, bulbuls, sunbirds, swiftlets, Seychelles skinks, burrowing skinks, tiger chameleons, day geckos, tree frogs, freshwater fish..  the list goes on and on. We even saw a crab hiding under one tree.

But the star of the whole experience, for me, was the atmosphere. Despite all this wildlife there is a timeless peacefulness in the forest broken only by scurrying, flapping, scuffling and the palms creaking. The sunlight falls through the leaves just as it did when dinosaurs were alive. In that setting, knowing that some of the palms are 400 years old makes them seem like youngsters, and makes me feel like a blink of the eye. This is definitely a place to come if you need to get things into perspective.

One visitor whose reaction was a bit, well, over the top, was the British General Gordon who met a nasty end some years later in Khartoum. He was visiting the Seychelles in 1881 and firmly believed the Vallée de Mai was the Bible’s Garden of Eden, and that the coco de mer was the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge.

In other words, the tree that Eve plucked a fruit from and made women’s lot miserable for all eternity. The general was taken with the shape of the coco de mer fruit, which is basically like a big woman’s bottom and extraordinarily is the official stamp of the Seychelles.

However, given that the fruit is a nut and can weigh up to 45kgs, poor Eve would have found it impossible to lift, let alone take a bite. Not surprisingly, the coco de mer (French for “coconut of the sea”) has centuries of myth and legend attached to it, being found washed up on far-flung shores by sailors long before Praslin was discovered in the 1700s.

Honestly, how many forests have this much going for them?

Verdict: One amazing day out.

Top tips: A day on Praslin gives you plenty of time to walk the forest and spend a few hours on the beach, so take swimming stuff with you.