Kakadu National Park

The change happens before you reach the park boundary. Driving north from Darwin on the Arnhem Highway, somewhere around the two-hour mark, the red dirt country starts to give way to something lusher and heavier. The eucalypts thin and pandanus palms begin appearing at the road’s edge, their spiny crowns catching the low light. The sky, which has been a simple blue dome, develops weather — cloud formations building to the south, the kind of cumulus that in the wet season becomes something else entirely. By the time the Kakadu sign appears you can smell a different Australia, humid and green and carrying the faint mineral tang of floodwater from months ago.

I arrived during the dry season, which is the only time most of the park is accessible by road. The Yellow Water wetlands at dawn are the kind of spectacle that travel writing has difficulty with, because the words available — beautiful, extraordinary, breathtaking — have been worn smooth by overuse. What I can say is this: I was on a flat-bottomed boat in the dark at 6 a.m., coffee still in hand, when the light came up over the paperbarks and the lotus flowers opened and the first jacanas started picking their way across the lily pads and a saltwater crocodile the length of a dining table drifted past the bow with no particular urgency. For about twenty minutes nothing I knew about the world felt very relevant.

The rock art at Ubirr is a different kind of astonishment. The site sits at the edge of the Nadab floodplain, a series of rock outcrops where the Bininj/Mungguy people created galleries of paintings over a period of at least 20,000 years. The figures are rendered in X-ray style — fish showing their internal organs, kangaroos with their skeletal structure visible — in ochre and white and charcoal that has lasted millennia because the overhanging rock protected it from direct rain. I stood in front of a painting of a barramundi and tried to do the mathematics. Twenty thousand years. Agriculture had not yet been invented when someone stood here and painted this fish on this rock. The floodplain below them looked exactly as it looks now.

The walk to the top of the Ubirr escarpment takes fifteen minutes and delivers one of the most disorienting views I have encountered — the entire Nadab floodplain spread below, stretching to the Arnhem Land plateau on the horizon, the same country the artists painted from, unchanged except for the birds which were probably the same species.

Jim Jim Falls, accessible only by four-wheel drive along a corrugated track and then a rocky one-kilometre walk, drops 200 metres into a plunge pool of extraordinary clarity. In the dry season the flow reduces to a trickle, but the pool remains — ringed by sandstone boulders and pandanus palms, cold and green and still. I swam in it for half an hour and saw no other people. The park is enormous enough that solitude is entirely possible if you go beyond the established circuits. Kakadu is 19,804 square kilometres. Most visitors see perhaps five percent of it.

When to go: The dry season, May through October, is when roads are open and wildlife concentrates around waterholes. June and July are ideal — cool enough at night, clear skies, the wetlands still full enough for good birdwatching. The wet season, November through April, closes most roads but transforms the park: Jim Jim Falls becomes a proper waterfall again, the floodplains fill, and the whole place turns electric green. Charter flights and elevated walks at Mamukala remain accessible year-round.